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Haiti’s serious crime unit to investigate foreigners arrested with guns

A woman carries a deck in front of a main Haitian police station, where according to local media a group of foreign nationals including Americans armed with semi-automatic weapons were detained, after anti-government protests, in Port-au-Prince
A woman carries a deck in front of a main Haitian police station, where according to local media a group of foreign nationals including Americans armed with semi-automatic weapons were detained, after anti-government protests, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, February 18, 2019. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado

February 19, 2019

By Ezequiel Abiu Lopez

(Reuters) – The serious crime unit of Haiti’s national police is investigating several foreign nationals, including Americans, who were arrested in possession of semi-automatic weapons, Prime Minister Jean-Henry Ceant said.

The group, which included five U.S. citizens, was arrested while driving in two vehicles on Sunday in the capital Port-au-Prince, adding to uncertainty in the impoverished Caribbean country after days of anti-government protests.

Ceant wrote on Twitter late on Monday that the investigation had been turned over to the Judicial Police Department, the detective service that works on serious organized and transnational crime in the poor Caribbean nation.

Ceant also said he had convened Haiti’s police security council, which includes the interior and justice ministers and senior police officials, to discuss the case. He did not say when the meeting would be held.

The U.S. State Department has said American citizens were part of the group but has not revealed their identities.

Names given by Haitian media correspond to social media profiles of American citizens and a Serbian who claim military backgrounds and currently work for security contractors.

National police chief Michel Ange Gedeon said the group face charges of illegal possession of weapons, Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported.

Thousands of Haitians have been staging demonstrations since Feb. 7, to demand the resignation of President Jovenel Moise amid allegations of corruption and over high inflation. The protests have receded in recent days.

(Reporting by Ezequiel Abiu Lopez in Santo Domingo; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)

Source: OANN

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Watchdog Urges '20 Candidates to Release Tax Returns

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is urging all 2020 presidential candidates to release their tax returns for the past 10 years.

"Four years after Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president, we have still not seen his tax returns, despite reporting that suggests that those returns may show evidence of criminality and despite the fact that releasing them would be one of the best ways to illuminate potential conflicts of interest," the watchdog group said in a statement on its website.

CREW called on all presidential candidates to release their returns from at least the past 10 years "so that all Americans can compare what each candidate has released and read the returns themselves."

The group is tracking which 2020 candidates have released their returns.

CREW's call for tax returns was detailed in a report by The Hill. It noted so far only two Democrats have released at least 10 years of returns – Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

Meanwhile, The Hill reported House Democrats plan to try to get Trump's tax returns by requesting them from the Treasury Department.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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CNN Wins ‘Cronkite Award’ For Parkland Town Hall Which Saw NRA Rep Berated, Threatened With Violence

CNN was bestowed the Cronkite Award for its “Parkland Town Hall” which resulted in NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch being escorted off the premises after attendees berated and tried to assault her.

The University of Southern California held the 10th biennial Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism on Wednesday, honoring CNN for its Parkland Town Hall last year for “helping advance the national conversation on gun control and violence.”

Loesch attended the event to defend the Second Amendment following the left’s calls for gun control over the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, but the audience ended up hurling insults and threats of violence against her.

“Is this a joke? Seriously,” she tweeted Tuesday, before releasing several video clips of the event while it wasn’t televised.

“Here is some footage where people were yelling to burn me at CNN’s award-winning townhall where they ‘advanced the conversation on gun control,'” she said.

“Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” the audience chanted as Loesch was escorted from the event.

Some conversation.

Here’s more of the “conversation.”

“This is what happened when the cameras turned off at @CNNPR ’s award-winning townhall. They’re proud of it,” Loesch continued.

In the mainstream media bizarro world, CNN is given awards for “advancing the conversation on gun control and violence” for hosting an event that demonizes the Second Amendment and threatens violence against detractors.

Even CNN CEO Jeff Zucker was given a First Amendment award after lobbying to censor his competition online.


Twitter: 

Will Johnson joins Alex Jones live via Skype to talk with callers about the distinct possibility of Globalist forces using the New Zealand shooting, whether as a premeditated false flag or not, to practice ’emergency’ internet censorship and gun confiscation on a global scale.

Source: InfoWars

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NYPD releases video showing hit-and-run driver striking 14-year-old pedestrian

Surveillance cameras from a New York City apartment building captured a harrowing scene: a hit-and-run driver striking a 14-year-old girl, who is sent hurtling into traffic -- before getting back on her feet, lucky to be alive.

The NYPD released footage from the video Saturday, seeking to identify the female driver.

The teen, Xin Yi Wang, only sustained bumps and bruises and says the video is hard to watch.

POLICE HUNT THIEVES IN CHURCH DONATION BOX ROBBERIES CAUGHT ON CAMERA

“I see myself just fly on the ground,” she told WCBS-TV. “In my memory I would say it’s just a short distance, but when [I] see the video, it’s a long distance flying. I was…oh my God, lucky I didn’t get hit by another car.”

Xin Yi Wang, 14, said she is lucky she wasn't hit by another car after being struck by a hit-and-run driver in New York City last month.

Xin Yi Wang, 14, said she is lucky she wasn't hit by another car after being struck by a hit-and-run driver in New York City last month. (NYPD)

Xin was coming home from school March 27 in Borough Park, Brooklyn, when she was hit.

MISSING MOTHER’S ESTRANGED HUSBAND, WOMAN CHARGED WITH MURDER, NEW YORK CITY POLICE SAY

The video shows her walking in a crosswalk at the time, apparently with the right of way based on the traffic flow.

Police said the vehicle that struck her was a Dodge Charger with Georgia license plates.

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The video shows the driver getting out of the Charger, talking to Xin, getting back in and then driving away.

Source: Fox News National

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Three UK cabinet ministers back Brexit delay if May’s plan voted down: report

Britain's Secretary of State for Business Greg Clark is seen outside of Downing Street in London
Britain's Secretary of State for Business Greg Clark is seen outside of Downing Street in London, Britain, February 19, 2019. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls

February 22, 2019

LONDON (Reuters) – Three British cabinet ministers have publicly indicated they could back plans to delay Brexit if hardline lawmakers vote down Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for a new deal with the European Union, The Sun newspaper reported.

Business minister Greg Clark, work and pensions minister Amber Rudd, and justice minister David Gauke signaled in a joint statement that they will side with rebels next week to stop Britain leaving without a divorce deal on March 29.

The ministers called on members of the European Research Group, formed by Conservative pro-Brexit lawmakers, to back the government’s deal or risk seeing Brexit delayed, according to the newspaper.

(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Tom Brown)

Source: OANN

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Beto doubles down on call to abolish Electoral College

Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke reiterated his call on Monday to abolish the Electoral College.

Answering a question from the audience at the We The People summit in Washington, the former Texas congressman argued that doing away with the Electoral College would restore the trust of voters, impinge on the practice of gerrymandering and allow for fairer elections.

“Let’s abolish the electoral college,” O’Rourke said. “If we get rid of the Electoral College, we’d get a little closer to one person, one vote.”

He added: “Our democracy…it is warped, it is corrupted right now. It we don’t fix it, it’s never going to get better.”

BETO O'ROURKE PICKING UP SUPPORT FROM PRIMARY RIVALS OUT OF THE GATE

O’Rourke, who rose to national prominence during his failed campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas last fall, has spoken before about moving to abolish the Electoral College.

During an event at Penn State University last month, O’Rourke questioned how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election despite receiving more votes overall than President Trump.

“I think there’s a lot to that. Because you had an election in 2016 where the loser got 3 million more votes than the victor,” O’Rourke said in a video posted online.

He added: “It puts some states out of play altogether, they don’t feel like their votes really count.

“If we really want everyone to vote, to give them every reason to vote, we have to make sure their votes count and go to the candidate of their choosing,” O’Rourke said. “So I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.”

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O’Rourke’s call echoes that of his fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who also has advocated abolishing the Electoral College.

“Every vote matters and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College,” Warren said.

If the move is ever brought to fruition, it would almost certainly face a court challenge.

It has gained renewed attention amid Democrats grumbling about the Electoral College in the wake of President Trump's 2016 win. While he defeated Hillary Clinton in the electoral vote, he lost the popular vote by 2.9 million ballots.

Fox News’ Liam Quinn contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Trump team is likely ‘pretty concerned’ about Joe Biden, Federalist publisher says

Contrary to some public statements, President Trump and his campaign staff are likely "pretty concerned" about having former Vice President Joe Biden as a potential opponent in 2020, the Federalist publisher Ben Domenech said Thursday.

"I actually think they are pretty concerned about him," Domenech said during an appearance on Fox News' "Special Report with Bret Baier."

Domenech noted that part of the concern may stem from the fact that Trump and Biden -- a Democrat who made his White House bid official Thursday morning -- appeal to some of the same types of voters.

STEVE FORBES: BIDEN'S RUN 'FOUR YEARS TOO LATE'

"I think part of that has to do with the fact that Joe Biden has clearly proven in the past to appeal to the same states that were key to President Trump in deciding the 2016 election," Domenech said. For example, Biden -- a longtime U.S. senator from Delaware, often speaks of his childhood in Pennsylvania, a state that Trump won over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In his campaign kickoff video Thursday, Biden argued that "if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen."

Nevertheless, Trump welcomed Biden to the race, calling him "Sleepy Joe" in a tweet and warning Biden to prepare for a "nasty" primary fight against a large field of other Democrats seeking the party's presidential nomination.

Domenech said Biden is a much stronger candidate than others believe he is, in particular with African-Americans.

"Personally I think the elite opinion is wrong about Joe Biden, that he actually is a much stronger candidate that they are giving credit for," Domenech said. "I think a large part of that is that he has an enormous wellspring of support among African-American voters that you do not see for a lot of the other candidates in this race. Where they might be appealing to the more 'woke' white progressive vote that I think is the loudest and shouting about a lot of different issues right now."

The Federalist publisher also said Biden will need to deal with issues from earlier in his career that his Democratic rivals will almost certainly raise.

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"The problem here for him is how does he deal with all the hits that are going to come against him from his past?" Domenech said.

"We've seen them used in lot of different ways and I think they will be deployed against him. He will have to come up with different ways to respond to the different aspects of that."

Source: Fox News Politics

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Tiger woods celebrates after winning the 2019 Masters
FILE PHOTO: Golf – Masters – Augusta National Golf Club – Augusta, Georgia, U.S. – April 14, 2019 – Tiger Woods of the U.S. celebrates on the 18th hole after winning the 2019 Masters. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

April 26, 2019

Tiger Woods is sending a message that he thinks he still has enough left, emotionally and physically, to win three more major championships to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 titles.

Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.

“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night … that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”

That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.

He said he has been spending time with his children – daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 – who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.

“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”

He said he hopes – maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.

And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.

Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.

“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.

Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.

“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career – one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago – if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.

“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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Maria Butina, the Russian woman who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday by a federal judge in Washington after pleading guilty last year to a conspiracy charge.

Butina, who has already served nine months behind bars, will get credit for time served and can possibly get credit for good behavior, the judge said. She will be removed from the U.S. promptly on completion of her time, the judge added, and returned to Russia.

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

An emotional and apologetic Butina said in court Friday she is “truly sorry” and regrets not registering as a foreign agent.

“I feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she said, adding that her “reputation is ruined.”

Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018. She entered the court Friday wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit and spoke in clear English, with a slight Russian accent.

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said after the sentencing they had hoped for a “better outcome,” but expressed a desire for Butina to be released to her family by the fall.

Prosecutors had claimed Butina used her contacts with the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather information for Russia.

Prosecutors also have said that Butina’s boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, identified in court papers as “U.S. Person 1,” helped her establish ties with the NRA.

WHO IS MARIA BUTINA, THE RUSSIAN WOMAN ACCUSED OF SPYING ON US?

In their filings, prosecutors claim federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of being employed by Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.

Investigators recovered several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which Butina referred to the need to keep her work secret and, in one instance, said it should be “incognito.” Prosecutors said Butina had contact with Russian intelligence officials and that the FBI photographed her dining with a diplomat suspected of being a Russian intelligence agent.

Fox News’ Jason Donner, Bill Mears, Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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An official Sri Lankan police Twitter account was deleted after it misidentified an American human rights activist as a suspect in the country’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks.

On Thursday, police posted the names and photos of six people that they said were at-large suspects in the bombings that killed more than 250 people.

However, one of the names on the list was Muslim U.S. activist Amara Majeed, who quickly tweeted that she had been falsely identified.

“I have this morning been FALSELY identified by the Sri Lankan government as one of the ISIS terrorists that committed the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. What a thing to wake up to!” she wrote.

SRI LANKA AUTHORITIES SAY EASTER ATTACK LEADER KILLED IN ONE OF NINE HOTEL BOMBINGS

She wrote in a follow-up tweet that the claim was “obviously completely false” and asked social media users to “please stop implicating and associating me with these horrific attacks.”

“And next time, be more diligent about releasing such information that has the potential to deeply violate someone’s family and community,” she continued.

Later, she wrote an update saying police apologized for wrongly mistaking her as a suspect.

Police said in a statement: “However, although one of the released images was identified as one Abdul Cader Fathima Khadhiya in the information provided by the CID, the CID has now informed that a) the individual whose image was labeled as Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya is not in fact Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya b) the individual pictured is not wanted for questioning c) Abdul Cader Fathima is the correct name of the suspect wanted by the CID.”

On Friday, the account, @SriLankaPolice2 was deleted with no explanation. Police did not release more information regarding the mistake.

Majeed, who founded “The Hijab Project” when she was 16 years old, told the Baltimore Sun that it was hurtful to be linked to the attacks.

“Sri Lanka is my motherland,” the Brown University student said. “It’s very painful to be associated with [the bombings].”

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Mohamed Zahran, the suspected leader of the attacks which targeted six hotels and churches, killed himself in a suicide bombing at the Shangri-La hotel. Police also said they had arrested the second-in-command of the group, called National Towheed Jamaat. Catholic churches in Sri Lanka canceled all Sunday Masses until further notice over concerns that they remain a top target of Islamic State-linked extremists.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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Source: InfoWars

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FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Easter Sunday, in Colombo
FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, five days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Catholic churches and luxury hotels across the island on Easter Sunday, in Colombo, Sri Lanka April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

KATTANKUDY, Sri Lanka (Reuters) – Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran was 12 years old when he began his studies at the Jamiathul Falah Arabic College. He was a nobody, with no claim to scholarship other than ambition.

Zahran and his four brothers and sisters squeezed into a two-room house with their parents in a small seaside town in eastern Sri Lanka; their father was a poor man who sold packets of food on the street and had a reputation for being a petty thief.

“His father didn’t do much,” recalled the school’s vice principal, S.M. Aliyar, laughing out loud.

The boy surprised the school with his sharp mind. For three years, Zahran practiced memorizing the Koran. Next came his studies in Islamic law. But the more he learned, the more Zahran argued that his teachers were too liberal in their reading of the holy book.

“He was against our teaching and the way we interpreted the Koran – he wanted his radical Islam,” said Aliyar. “So we kicked him out.”

Aliyar, now 73 with a long white beard, remembers the day Zahran left in 2005. “His father came and asked, ‘Where can he go?’.”

The school would hear again of Mohamed Zahran. And the world now knows his name. The Sri Lankan government has identified him as the ringleader of a group that carried out a series of Easter Sunday suicide bombings in the country on April 21.

The blasts killed more than 250 people in churches and luxury hotels, one of the deadliest-ever such attacks in South Asia. There were nine suicide bombers who blew apart men, women and children as they sat to pray or ate breakfast.

Most of the attackers were well-educated and from wealthy families, with some having been abroad to study, according to Sri Lankan officials.

That description does not, however, fit their alleged leader, a man said to be in his early 30s, who authorities say died in the slaughter. Zahran was different.

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

Sri Lanka’s national leadership has come under heavy criticism for failing to heed warnings from Indian intelligence services – at least three in April alone – that an attack was pending. But Zahran’s path from provincial troublemaker to alleged jihadist mastermind was marked by years of missed or ignored signals that the man with a thick beard and paunch was dangerous.

His increasingly militant brand of Islam was allowed to grow inside a marginalized minority community – barely 10 percent of the country’s roughly 20 million people are Muslim – against a backdrop of a dysfunctional developing nation.

The top official at the nation’s defense ministry resigned on Thursday, saying that some institutions under his charge had failed.

For much of his adult life, Zahran, 33, courted controversy inside the Muslim community itself.

In the internet age, that problem did not stay local. Zahran released online videos calling for jihad and threatening bloodshed.

After the blasts, Islamic State claimed credit and posted a video of Zahran, clutching an assault rifle, standing before the group’s black flag and pledging allegiance to its leader.

The precise relationship between Zahran and Islamic State is not yet known. An official with India’s security services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that during a raid on a suspected Islamic State cell by the National Investigation Agency earlier this year officers found copies of Zahran’s videos. The operation was in the state of Tamil Nadu, just across a thin strait of ocean from Sri Lanka.

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

Back in 2005, Zahran was looking to make his way in the world. His hometown of Kattankudy is some seven hours’ drive from Colombo on the other side of the island nation, past the countless palm trees, roadside Buddha statues, cashew hawkers and an occasional lumbering elephant in the bush. It is a town of about 40,000 people, a dot on the eastern coast with no clear future for an impoverished young man who’d just been expelled.

Zahran joined a mosque in 2006, the Dharul Athar, and gained a place on its management committee. But within three years they’d had a falling out.

“He wanted to speak more independently, without taking advice from elders,” said the mosque’s imam, or spiritual leader, M.T.M. Fawaz.

Also, the young man was more conservative, Fawaz said, objecting, for instance, to women wearing bangles or earrings.

“The rest of us come together as community leaders but Zahran wanted to speak for himself,” said Fawaz, a man with broad shoulders lounging with a group of friends in a back office of the mosque after evening prayers. “He was a black sheep who broke free.”

Mohamed Yusuf Mohamed Thaufeek, a friend who met Zahran at school and later became an adherent of his, said the problems revolved around Zahran’s habit of misquoting Islamic scriptures.

The mosque’s committee banned him from preaching for three months in 2009. Zahran stormed off.

“We treated him like a spoiled child, a very narrow-minded person who was always causing some trouble,” said the head of the committee, Mohamed Ismail Mohamed Naushad, a timber supplier who shook his head at the memory.

Now on his own, Zahran began to collect a group of followers who met in what Fawaz described as “a hut”.

At about that time, Zahran, then 23, married a young girl from a small town outside the capital of Colombo and brought his bride back to Kattankudy, according to his sister, Mathaniya.

“I didn’t have much of a connection with her – she was 14,” she said.

Despite being “a bit rough-edged”, Zahran was a skilled speaker and others his age were drawn to his speeches and Koranic lessons, said Thaufeek. He traveled the countryside at times, giving his version of religious instruction as he went.

Also, Zahran had found a popular target: the town’s Sufi population, who practice a form of Islam often described a mystical, but which to conservatives is heresy.

Tensions in the area went back some years. In 2004, there was a grenade attack on a Sufi mosque and in 2006 several homes of Sufis were set afire. Announcements boomed from surrounding mosques at the time calling for a Sufi spiritual leader to be killed, said Sahlan Khalil Rahman, secretary of a trust that oversees a group of Sufi mosques.

He blamed followers of the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam that some locals say became more popular after funding from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, flowed to mosques in Kattankudy.

It was, Rahman said, an effort “to convert Sufis into Wahhabis through this terrorism”. Rahman handed over a photograph album showing charred homes, bullet holes sprayed across an office wall and a shrine’s casket upended.

ONLINE RADICAL

It was an ideal backdrop for Zahran’s bellicose delivery and apparent sense of religious destiny.

He began holding rallies, bellowing insults through loudspeakers that reverberated inside the Sufis’ house of worship as they tried to pray.

In 2012, Zahran started a mosque of his own. The Sufis were alarmed and, Rahman said, passed on complaints to both local law enforcement and eventually national government offices. No action was taken.

The then-officer in charge of Kattankudy police, Ariyabandhu Wedagedara, said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t arrest people simply because of theological differences.

     “The problem at the time was between followers of different Islamic sects – Zahran was not a major troublemaker, but he and followers of other sects, including the Sufis, were at loggerheads,” Wedagedara said.

Zahran found another megaphone: the internet. His Facebook page was taken down after the bombings, but Muslims in the area said his video clips had previously achieved notoriety.

His speeches went from denouncing Sufis to “kafirs”, or non-believers, in general. Zahran’s sister, Mathaniya, said in an interview that she thought “his ideas became more radical from listening to Islamic State views on the Internet”.

In one undated video, Zahran, in a white tunic and standing in front of an image of flames, boomed in a loud voice: “You will not have time to pick up the remains of blown-up bodies. We’ll keep sending those insulting Allah to hell.”

“HARD TO TAKE”

Zahran spoke in Tamil, making his words available to young Muslims clicking on their cellphones in Kattankudy and other towns like it during a period when, in both 2014 and 2018, reports and images spread of Sinhalese Buddhists rioting against Muslims in Sri Lanka.

In 2017, Zahran’s confrontations boiled over. At a rally near a Sufi community, his followers came wielding swords. At least one man was hacked and hospitalized. The police arrested several people connected to Zahran, including his father and one of his brothers. Zahran slipped away from public view.

That December, the mosque Zahran founded released a public notice disowning him. Thaufeek, his friend from school, is now the head. He counted the places that Zahran had been driven away from – his school, the Dharul Athar mosque and then, “we ourselves kicked him out, which would have been hard for him to take”.

The next year, a group of Buddha statues was vandalized in the town of Mawanella, about five hours drive from Kattankudy. There, in the lush mountains of Sri Lanka’s interior, Zahran had taken up temporary residence.

“He was preaching to kill people,” said A.G.M. Anees, who has served as an imam at a small mosque in the area for a decade. “This is not Islam, this is violence.”

Zahran went into hiding once more.

On the Thursday morning before the Easter Sunday bombings, Zahran’s sister-in-law knocked on the door of a neighbor who did seamstress work near Kattankudy. She handed over a parcel of fabric and asked for it to be sewn into a tunic by the end of the day.

“She said she was going on a family trip,” said the neighbor, M.H. Sithi Nazlya.

Zahran’s sister says that her parents turned off their cellphones on the Friday. On Sunday, when she visited their home, they were gone.

She does not know if Zahran arranged for them to be taken somewhere safe. Or why he would have carried out the bombing.

But now in Kattankudy, and in many other places, people are talking about Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran.

(Reporting by Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam; Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani, Shihar Aneez and Alasdair Pal; Editing by John Chalmers and Alex Richardson)

Source: OANN

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