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Report: Biden Has Access to 2012 Obama-Biden Email List

Former Vice President Joe Biden's access to the email list used by the Obama-Biden campaign in 2012 will come in handy during Biden's expected presidential campaign, according to a new report.

The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that Biden — who is likely to enter the 2020 race Thursday — has already sent messages to the millions of addresses in the coveted list.

According to the report, the Biden-aligned American Possibilities PAC sent out an email blast this week to people on the list. A Biden spokesman then told The Daily Beast the PAC was given the green light to use the list.

"It is a lane to compete for," the 2012 campaign's press secretary Ben LaBolt told The Daily Beast. "Talking about expanding upon strengthening healthcare, making the economy work for families regardless of their income level, returning to a government of dignity and normalcy, restoring alliances abroad, that would be an attractive message for a lot of voters."

Former White House director of communications Jennifer Palmieri, meanwhile, said the list is just one piece of the equation.

Palmieri said the list is "certainly helpful. I don't know if it is a golden ticket."

Rumors about Biden running for president — which he has done unsuccessfully on two previous occasions — have swirled for months. He has also been accused of inappropriate conduct with women in public settings, for which he said he would be "much more mindful" about crossing into people's personal space.

Source: NewsMax America

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Trump: ‘Dirty Cops’ At FBI Paid ‘Fake Dossier Author’ Steele

President Trump slammed the FBI in a tweet Wednesday, stating that the intelligence agency conspired against his presidential campaign.

Trump addressed the ‘fake’ dossier authored by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, which was funded in part by Fusion GPS, a political intelligence firm working for the DNC, calling it a “total fraud on your President and the American people!”

He also took aim at “Crooked Hillary” noting that eleven payments were made to the former to British spy Steele by the FBI in 2016.

The president tagged conservative news outlet OANN, which reported on the details on Tuesday. Watchdog Judicial Watch previously obtained documents which show the payments were made. The details relating to each payment were heavily redacted.

Judicial Watch is suing for communication and payment records between the FBI, Steele, and his private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.

“How and why did the FBI pay Christopher Steele, who was already being funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC through Fusion GPS?” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

“That we had to sue for this basic information shows the FBI may have something more to hide.” Fitton added.

Responding to Fitton’s statement, The Federalist’s Sean Davis noted that the information Steele was providing the FBI in 2016 and 2017 most likely stemmed from a huge Russian disinformation campaign. “There was Russian collusion in 2016, but from Hillary and Obama,” Davis noted.

Attorney General William Barr and his team are investigating potential abuses by FBI and Department of Justice officials involved in the the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.

Source: InfoWars

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UK retailers report first rise in sales for five months: CBI

FILE PHOTO - A person walks past a sale sign on Oxford Street in London
FILE PHOTO - A person walks past a sale sign on Oxford Street in London, Britain, December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville

April 25, 2019

LONDON (Reuters) – British retail sales rose for the first time in five months in April, a leading employers’ group said on Thursday, adding to signs that consumers have recovered their appetite for spending even as the country’s Brexit impasse drags on.

The Confederation of British Industry said the later timing of Easter this year probably helped to push its monthly sales balance up to +13, meaning more retailers reported rising sales than falling sales.

The index suffered its biggest fall in 17 months in March when it sank to -18.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected a reading of zero for April.

“It’s encouraging to see retailers with more of a spring in their step than in recent months,” Rain Newton-Smith, the CBI’s chief economist, said.

“The recent pick up in real wages is a welcome support to the sector, making the pound in people’s pockets stretch that bit further.”

But falling sales in clothing and department stores showed how tough the underlying conditions were for retailers, Newton-Smith said.

Official data published last week showed retail sales volumes surged by the most in nearly two-and-a-half years in annual terms, leaping by 6.7 percent.

The CBI said retailers were more optimistic about sales in the month ahead than they had been in March.

(Reporting by William Schomberg, editing by David Milliken)

Source: OANN

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Heavy fighting flares between Taliban, Islamic State in Afghanistan

Afghan villagers who fled from the fighting sides arrive at the Behsud district of Nangarhar province
Afghan villagers who fled from the fighting sides arrive at the Behsud district of Nangarhar province, Afghanistan April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Parwiz

April 24, 2019

KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan Taliban insurgents are battling fighters loyal to Islamic State over control of territory in eastern Afghanistan in some of the heaviest clashes over the past year between the rival militants, officials said on Wednesday.

The fighting erupted on Monday in two districts of the eastern Afghan border province of Nangarhar, when Islamic State fighters attacked villages under Taliban control.

“Islamic State fighters have captured six villages in Khogyani and Shirzad districts but the fighting has not stopped,” said Sohrab Qaderi, a member Nangarhar’s the provincial council.

About 500 families had fled from the fighting, he said.

Casualty figures were not available.

A spokesman for the Taliban, who control more territory than at any point since they were ousted from power nearly 18 years ago, was not available for comment.

Islamic State fighters first appeared in eastern Afghanistan in around 2014 and have battled the Taliban as well as government and foreign forces.

The Afghan affiliate of Islamic State, sometimes known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), after an old name for the region that includes Afghanistan, has made some inroads into other areas, in the north in particular.

It has also established a reputation for unusual cruelty, even by the standards of the Afghan conflict, and has been behind some of the deadliest attacks in urban centers.

While Nangarhar, on the border with Pakistan, has been an Islamic State stronghold, some villages in Khogyani and Shirzad districts have been controlled by the Taliban.

Fleeing villagers said they had to run for their lives.

“I could only rescue my family. We had to leave everything,” said Shawkat, 36, a resident of Markikhel village in Shirzad district who sought safety in a neighboring village.

Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the provincial governor said, authorities would help the displaced villagers with food and medicine.

In August, more than 150 Islamic State fighters surrendered to the Afghan security forces after they were defeated by the Taliban in the northwestern province of Jawzjan.

The U.S. military estimates there are about 2,000 Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan.

Many are former Taliban. There is scant evidence of direct links with Islamic State in the Middle East, where the group has lost territory it once held in Syria and Iraq to Western-backed forces.

(Reporting by Abdul Qadir Sediqi in Kabul and Ahmad Sultan in Nangarhar; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Source: OANN

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Trump Administration Sends List of Russian Collusion Liars to TV Producers

The Trump administration has sent a memo to TV producers which contains a list of Russian collusion liars, advising networks to challenge individuals like Rep. Peter Schiff on their “false claims” in future.

The memo, sent by Trump’s Director of Communications Tim Murtaugh, was sent a day after the Mueller investigation’s conclusion which completely vindicated President Trump.

It lists Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Rep. Eric Swalwell, DNC Chairman Tom Perez and former CIA director John Brennan.

The memo accuses the above of “lying to the American people by vigorously and repeatedly claiming there was evidence of collusion.”

“They made many of these false claims, without evidence, on your airwaves,” the memo adds, before giving an example for each of the individuals named.

The memo then asks TV producers to think twice before booking the same guests again.

“Moving forward, we ask that you employ basic journalistic standards when booking such guests to appear anywhere in your universe of productions,” states the memo, adding, “At a minimum, if these guests do reappear, you should replay the prior statements and challenge them to provide the evidence which prompted them to make the wild claims in the first place.”

While Trump has zero power to tell the media who they can and can’t have on as guests, leftists will undoubtedly weave this into their wider conspiracy theory that the president is trying to intimidate and shut down the media.

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Source: InfoWars

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Gold, Silver Demand Surge Since Financial Crisis

The conventional wisdom is that demand for gold and silver has been somewhat tepid over the last couple of years.

In fact, global gold demand grew by about 4% in 2018 and was in line with the five-year average. Much of that growth was due to a surged in demand through the fourth quarter as stock markets tanked, and concerns about debt and the global economy grew.

We tend to be pretty short-sighted when we look at market trends. Most investors focus on the day-to-day gyrations. As a result, we often completely miss significant long-term trends. For instance, investment demand for gold and silver has increased dramatically in the decade since the financial crisis.

According to data compiled by SRSrocco, investors purchased 16,200 tons of gold and 57,800 of silver from 2009-2018. That translates to 520 million ounces of gold and nearly 2 billion ounces of silver. This only includes physical coin and bar demand.

This compares with gold investment of 3,965 tons and 15,300 tons of silver investment between 1999 and 2008. In other words, investors bought nearly four times more gold and silver after the 2008 crash than they did in the decade before.


Dr. Nick Begich breaks down the corrupt foundation upon which the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank sit as they take advantage of free people living under their attempt to take total control of all economic activity.

Last year, retail investment in gold bars and gold coins grew by 4%. Coin demand reached a five-year high of 236.4 tons, the second highest total on record. Demand for gold bars held steady at 781.6 tons, the fifth year in succession of holding in a firm 780 to 800-ton range. As SRSrocco noted, this is still pretty healthy demand, especially considering 99% of investors are busy in the “Grand Global Casino.”

“That should say something about the strength of the precious physical metals demand with less than 1% of the market participating. What happens to gold and silver demand when the central banks are no longer able to prop up the financial and economic system? Please understand; it’s not a matter of ‘IF,’ it’s a matter of ‘WHEN.’”

(Photo by Виталий Смолыгин / CC0 Public Domain)

Despite the high demand for investment gold and silver in the last decade, the price of both has underperformed – primarily due to dollar strength. As SRSrocco points out, stocks and real estate prices have soared while metals, peaked, declined and then stayed relatively flat. This has led to a lot of frustration for precious metals investors. But SRSrocco makes a good point.

“That in itself should give anyone with a decent amount of intellectual know-how the ability to sniff out that… SOMETHING JUST AIN’T RIGHT.  For some odd reason, all the negative aspects of the economy, the massive debt, derivatives, and leverage are all but forgotten when all we do is focus on the highly inflated stock, bond, and real estate asset values. Unfortunately, the inability to see how the debt, derivatives, and leverage have created the biggest Global Ponzi Scheme in history will create the largest financial collapse ever witnessed, causing most investors to go bankrupt.  It’s only a matter of time, and time is running out.”


Colorado’s Senate passed the so-called ‘red flag bill’ that allows law enforcement to seize people’s guns if a court rules them at risk to themselves or others.

Source: InfoWars

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Egyptian voters back constitutional changes in referendum: election commission

Final day of the Egyptian referendum on draft constitutional amendments
Officials count ballots on the final day of the referendum on draft constitutional amendments, in Cairo, Egypt April 22, 2019. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

April 23, 2019

CAIRO (Reuters) – Nearly 90 percent of Egyptian voters have approved in a referendum constitutional changes that could see President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stay in power until 2030, the election commission said on Tuesday.

Voter turnout during the three-day referendum was 44.33 percent and 88.83 percent of those taking part approved the amendments, commission chairman Lasheen Ibrahim said.

“These (changes) are effective from now as your constitution,” Ibrahim told a news conference broadcast on state TV, adding that more than 23.4 million voters had endorsed the changes in the referendum.

The amendments, which were approved by Egypt’s parliament last week, will extend Sisi’s current term to six years from four and allow him to run again for a third six-year term in 2024.

They will also bolster the role of the military and expand the president’s power over judicial appointments.

(Reporting by Nayera Abdallah, writing by Lena Masri; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Source: OANN

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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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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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