The Kingsbury Hotel (Sri Lanka) The Kingsbury , formerly the Hotel Ceylon Intercontinental , is a nine-story star-class hotel located facing the Indian Ocean near Galle Face Green in the heart of Colombo City, Sri Lanka. History Unlike the resort architecture of the 1960s, Hotel Ceylon Intercontinental was established as an example of high-rise engineering ( Bozdoğan et al., 2022) . It was built in 1973 by Sri Lankan civil engineer U. N. Gunasekara and financed with a loan of $3.5 million from the Export-Import Bank of Washington D.C. ( Bozdoğan et al., 2022). 1996 & 2019 bomb blasts On 31 January 1996, a 400 kg truck bomb was detonated at the Central Bank complex in Colombo by LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), a militant group designated as a terrorist organization by a number of countries including Sri Lanka, India, the USA and the EU. At least 90 people were killed and 1,400 injured in the attack and it damaged several nearby buildings including the twin towers of the Colombo World Trade Centre , the Mercantile …