Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa, 11, was one of nearly 300 victims in the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka. His mother, left, reportedly survived the attacks. (Instagram)
The grief-stricken father of the young Washington DC boy killed in Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday bombings broke his silence on Monday, saying the terrorists who murdered his son have no idea what they took away from the world.
“The terrorists didn’t know who they were killing. But we should know what the world lost, what they took from the world,” grieving father Alex Arrow told ABC News of his 11-year-old son Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa.
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“A brilliant mind who — who was going to be a neuroscientist and — he won’t make it to his 12th birthday.”
The fifth-grader was a “very self-driven” world-traveler who’d visited five continents with his mother, Arrow said.
Shafritz de Zoysa had been in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo with his mother on Easter Sunday when a series of suicide bombs were set off in hotels and Christian churches across the South Asian nation, killing him and at least 311 others. His mother survived.
“She devoted her life to him,” Arrow said about the boy’s mother. “She sacrificed all of her time to be with him everywhere. To give him the culture of all of these places.”
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The student at the posh Sidwell Friends school in DC, which the Obama daughters attended, was slated to return to the US in July. He was hoping to attend Harvard like both of his parents.
“I don’t know what’s in the mind of a terrorist. I’m sure they don’t know what they took,” Arrow said. “They just blew themselves up, they have no idea. No idea. His story should be told.”
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