Top Asian News 3:50 a.m. GMT

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lankan security forces found 15 bodies, including six children, early Saturday after militants linked to the Easter bombings opened fire and set off explosives during a raid on their house in the country's east, police said. The gunbattle began Friday night after police tipped off soldiers to a suspected safe house near the town of Sammanthurai , where authorities said the militants detonated three explosions and opened fire. At least three others were wounded in the attack, said police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara. He said that some of the dead likely were militants who blew themselves up in suicide bombings.

Police say that 15 bodies including six children have been found after a raid in east Sri Lanka on militants linked to the Easter bombings. Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara gave the figures early Saturday after a gunfight between soldiers and the suspected militants near Sammanthurai. The gunbattle began Friday night after police tipped off soldiers to a suspected safe house, where authorities say the militants set off three explosions and opened fire. At least three others were wounded in the attack. Gunasekara says some of the dead likely were militants who blew themselves up in suicide bombings. Earlier, the military said at least one civilian had been killed in the attack.

NEGOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — An impatient little girl in a pretty dress pulls on the hand of a man, possibly her grandfather, as they cross a brick courtyard outside St. Sebastian's Church on Easter Sunday. Directly in her path a slightly built, bearded man, bent beneath the weight of a large backpack, slows down so he doesn't bump into the girl, his fingers seeming to touch her hair for just an instant as she passes. And then, CCTV cameras show, they both go about their day, the girl continuing across the courtyard, the man with the pack marching with purpose toward the main church building — a common, almost mundane interaction made chilling only by what happens next.

Some were celebrating one of the holiest days in Christianity. Some were working at Colombo hotels. Some were sitting down to brunches of shrimp and chicken and dim sum and sticky rice pudding and tables of food that seemed to go on forever. They were mostly Sri Lankan, but also British, American, Indian, Danish, Chinese and more. They were children. They were parents. And suddenly, in three churches and three high-end hotels, their lives intersected with suicide bombers who, authorities say, wanted to wreak vengeance on what they see as a world of infidels. Roughly 250 people died in six coordinated suicide bombings that ripped through Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump expressed confidence Friday that a bilateral trade deal between the U.S. and Japan can be reached quickly despite ongoing differences over tariffs as he opened talks with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House. Abe is the rare world leader who has managed to develop a personal relationship with Trump. They get along so well that Abe and his wife, Akie, joined Trump and his wife, Melania, for a couples' dinner Friday in the White House residence to celebrate the U.S. first lady's 49th birthday. The leaders planned to meet for a quick round of golf Saturday.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — At 12:10 p.m. Friday, men and boys in a Muslim neighborhood in Sri Lanka's capital did something everyone had warned them not to do: They came together to pray. Hundreds gathered at the Masjidus Salam Jumma mosque for their communal Friday prayers, one of many mosques that conducted services despite warnings of retaliatory violence. And while praying through tears to Allah to help their fellow countrymen, all stressed one thing: the Islamic State-claimed Easter attacks targeting churches and hotels that killed at least 250 people came from people who didn't truly believe the teachings of Islam.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Government dysfunction and an intelligence failure that preceded the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka are traced to simmering divisions between the president and prime minister after a weekslong political crisis that crippled the country last year. The government has admitted to a "lapse of intelligence" after officials failed to act upon near-specific information received from foreign agencies. Suicide bombers exploded themselves last Sunday in three churches and three luxury hotels, killing 253 people and wounding 400 more. Authorities said eight Muslim militants blew themselves up at their targets while the wife of one of the attackers blasted herself on being rounded up by police.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Hour by hour the death toll from Sri Lanka's Easter Sunday bombing attacks climbed. And then on Thursday it suddenly dropped. Sri Lankan authorities drastically revised the number of people killed in the near-simultaneous blasts at churches and luxury hotels in and around Colombo and in the distant seaside town of Batticaloa — from 359 on Wednesday to around 250. A top Health Ministry official, Dr. Anil Jasinghe, said that some bodies had been torn to pieces, and others had been destroyed, making identification difficult. But the discrepancy in the death toll was just one of many, the latest in a pattern of claims and counterclaims that have muddled the investigation into the Islamic State group-claimed attacks and called into question the government's ability to handle it, as suspects with possible access to explosives reportedly remain at large.

NEGOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Nearly a week later, even after the cleaners have come through, the blood can still be seen clearly. The statues of Jesus and the saints are still speckled with fragments of shrapnel. The smell of death is everywhere, though the bodies are long gone. Yet somehow, there's a beauty to St. Sebastian's, a neighborhood church in a Catholic enclave north of Sri Lanka's capital, where a man calmly walked in during Easter services with a heavy backpack and blew himself up. You can see the beauty in the broken stained-glass windows. It's there as the sun shines through the roof's gaping holes.

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — The arrest of an American man in Myanmar for growing 20 acres of cannabis plants is unjust because authorities were aware that his company was doing scientific research and police were confusing hemp with recreational marijuana, his lawyer said Friday. Attorney Thein Than Oo said that John Fredric Todoroki and the III M Global Nutraceutical Co. had received official permission for their activity, which he described as research. "This company rented the land and is running its laboratory officially," he said. "Their intention is to do research, not to sell or distribute. If their research goes well, they will work with the government." Myanmar's anti-drug agency says Todoroki and two Myanmar citizens were arrested after police on Monday raided the plantation on an industrial estate in the country's central Mandalay region.