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THE WAR IN AMERICA!!!

THE WAR IN AMERICA!!! Many of you are starting to recognize there is a “war” going on in our United States. We are in times never seen before in history. Our Democracy is being challenged and civil liberties are being taken from us! What used to be the Democratic party “No Longer” represents America… Facts […]

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Deutsche, Commerzbank favor merger over holding company structure: sources

FILE PHOTO: Outside view of the Deutsche Bank and the Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt
FILE PHOTO: Outside view of the Deutsche Bank and the Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany, March 18, 2019. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski/File Photo

April 5, 2019

By Arno Schuetze

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank favor a straightforward merger over more complex ways to structure a deal, three people close to the matter said.

In their base case scenario, a transaction would be organized as a share offer from Deutsche Bank for Commerzbank, they said. That structure is preferred to the creation of a new holding company, which is viewed as too difficult to execute.

“The holding structure is dead,” one of the people said, referring to setting up a holding company that would buy Deutsche and Commerzbank in return for shares of the new bank.

Sources said last year that Deutsche Bank was examining creating a holding company structure amid speculation at the time that it could merge with Commerzbank.

Last month the two banks confirmed they were in talks about a merger. A preliminary decision on whether they want to go forward is expected within days.

The people cautioned that no decision has yet been taken on a potential deal structure and there is still no certainty that a deal will be struck at all.

Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank declined to comment.

Regulators in the United States, Britain and Switzerland tend to favor the bank holding company structure, in part because it can help with the winding down of a troubled bank.

There has been a push since the financial crash to make banks easier to break up, lowering the risk that the problems of a troubled investment bank, for instance, could affect ordinary savers.

About 90 percent of U.S. banks, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, operate as holding companies, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve.

But converting to a holding company structure can be costly.

In Deutsche and Commerzbank’s case, defining the relative value of the two banks for a holding structure would be more complicated than simply negotiating a price for a simple takeover, the sources said.

As part of a deal, Deutsche Bank will be asked by the European Central Bank to raise fresh funds to plug capital holes resulting from asset revaluations and expected restructuring costs, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said earlier this week.

Issues around regulatory capital – and how to make use of the fact that Commerzbank trades well below book level, which can be used to boost such capital – are a talking point between the two banks.

Other issues focus on synergies, job cuts as well as legal and tax issues, people familiar with the matter have said.

(Reporting by Arno Schuetze; additional reporting by Kathrin Jones and Tom Sims; Editing by Susan Fenton and Louise Heavens)

Source: OANN

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Portugal marks 45 years of democracy but fight carries on

FILE PHOTO: People sing during a march marking the Carnation Revolution's 42nd anniversary in Lisbon
FILE PHOTO: People sing during a march marking the Carnation Revolution's 42nd anniversary in Lisbon, Portugal April 25, 2016. REUTERS/Rafael Marchante/File Photo

April 25, 2019

LISBON (Reuters) – Thousands marched in Portugal on Thursday to celebrate the almost bloodless revolution 45 years ago that ended its four-decade-long dictatorship, while politicians said that economic and social developments had not matched its democratic advance.

Dictator Antonio Oliveira Salazar ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968, though his regime only crumbled on April 25 1974, in the ‘Carnation’ revolution that led Portugal to democracy.

In Lisbon on Thursday, protesters young and old marched through the streets shouting “Fascism, never again!”. Demonstrators also took over the main streets of Portugal’s second-biggest city Porto, to hail the country’s liberation but also to demand more rights.

Portugal will hold a general election in October.

Holding a red carnation, the symbol of the revolution, Portugal’s president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa told a room in parliament packed with politicians and guests that more must be done to tackle the country’s most pressing challenges.

“We want more, much more from our social, political and economic democracy,” said Rebelo de Sousa. “Persisting inequalities continue to undermine cohesion between people, between groups and territories.”

Catarina Martins, leader of the Left Bloc, which backs Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s minority Socialist government, told public broadcaster RTP there are “many battles left to win to achieve equality”.

“We live in a country with such low wages and pensions,” she said. “People do not know if they can make it to the end of the month.” Portugal’s minimum wage is fixed at 600 euros a month, compared with 1,050 euros in Spain.

Opposition leader Rui Rio also argued the country is in need of reform, especially around its electoral, political and justice system. “After (this year’s election) political parties must consider a reform of the democratic regime in order for it to remain democratic,” he said.

Costa’s Socialists are expected to win October’s election, but may struggle to secure an outright majority.

(Reporting by Catarina Demony and Goncalo Almeida; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Source: OANN

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Slovenian government coalition signs agreement with Left party

FILE PHOTO: Marjan Sarec, Slovenia's PM speaks during an interview in Ljubljana
FILE PHOTO: Slovenia's Prime Minister Marjan Sarec speaks during an interview with Reuters in Ljubljana, Slovenia, February 1, 2019. REUTERS/Srdjan Zivulovic/File Photo

March 20, 2019

By Marja Novak

LJUBLJANA (Reuters) – The five parties of the Slovenian center-left government coalition signed an agreement of cooperation with the opposition Left party to secure support for its main projects over the next year, the six parties said on Wednesday.

The Chamber of Commerce and Industry warned that the agreement could hurt the Slovenian economy because the demands of the Left are expected to raise taxes and public spending.

But Prime Minister Marjan Sarec, whose government took over in September after June’s general election, said the minority government has no choice but to seek opposition support for its projects. The coalition holds 43 out of 90 parliamentary seats while the Left has 9 seats.

“The government is a minority coalition government. If we want to do anything we have to make arrangements, that is the reality of democracy,” Sarec told Radio Slovenia.

The Left expects its cooperation with the government will lead to higher taxes on profit, more public apartments with non-profit rents, an improved national health system and more long-term jobs, Left spokesman Nikola Janovic Kolenc told Reuters.

The Chamber of Commerce said the demands of the Left could burden companies by as much as 1.4 billion euros ($1.59 billion)and hit the 46 billion-euro economy.

“We need a favorable business environment, productivity growth and the respect for those who work. The agreement between the coalition and the Left does not guarantee any of these. It is a mixture of expensive populist decrees which go against the development of the economy,” it said in a statement.

The agreement was signed just before the Left helped parliament confirm its 2019 budget plan earlier on Wednesday.

According to the agreement the Left will cooperate in the preparation of the 2020 and 2021 budgets later this year, which are expected to be confirmed by parliament before the end of 2019.

The largest opposition party, the center-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), claims the Left is in fact stronger than the coalition parties.

“As long as the state is actually governed by the Left the economy will be regressing,” said Branko Grims, a member of parliament from the SDS.

(Reporting by Marja Novak; editing by Ken Ferris)

Source: OANN

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Nadler floats idea of Stephen Miller taking questions from Congress over immigration

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., on Sunday said White House aide Stephen Miller, “who seems to be the boss of everybody on immigration,” should appear in front of Congress and try to explain recent developments in policy, including the idea to send migrants from the border to sanctuary cities.

Nadler told CNN that he learned from “whistle-blowers” that Miller was behind the idea to place the illegal immigrants in these cities.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders confirmed to "Fox News Sunday" that President Trump's prospective plan to send illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities is undergoing a "complete and thorough review," days after Democrats who have fought to protect illegal immigrants from federal authorities characterized the possible move as a dangerous stunt.

Trump has grown increasingly frustrated over the situation at the border, where tens of thousands of immigrant families are crossing each month, many to claim asylum. His administration has attempted several efforts to stop the flow and he recently shook up the top ranks of the Department of Homeland Security.

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The idea to ship immigrants to Democratic strongholds was considered twice in recent months, but the White House and Department of Homeland Security said the plan had been rejected.

Fox News' Gregg Re and the Associated Press contributed to this report 

Source: Fox News Politics

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Killer who spent 27 years in prison is murdered in his car in New York City

A convicted murderer who served 27 years in prison was assassinated Wednesday in broad daylight while sitting in his car in New York City, police say.

Franklin Bello, 48, was pulled over to the side of the road in Manhattan when a gunman approached him and fired off nine rounds, striking him at least five times in the chest, police told the New York Daily News.

“It was an easy job,” Jonathan Colon, who says he witnessed the attack, said to the newspaper.  “[The victim] pulls over and the guy just walks up and pow! pow! pow!”

LEGENDARY NYC MAFIA BOSS CARMINE PERSICO DIES BEHIND BARS AT 85

Investigators say Bello rolled out of his car onto the sidewalk after being hit, but was later pronounced dead at a local hospital, according to the New York Post. No arrests have been made and the motive for the attack is unclear.

NEW YORK MOBSTER, WHO SERVED JAIL TIME AGE 100 BECAUSE HE DIDN'T RAT: 'JESUS SUFFERED. HE DIDN'T SQUEAL ON NOBODY'

The gunman fled after the shooting. Police described him as Hispanic, in his 20s, wearing a black jacket and baseball cap.

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Police sources told the New York Daily News that Bello spent nearly three decades in prison after shooting and killing a 22-year-old man in Brooklyn in 1991, when he was 20 years old.

Bello was released in 2008 but served six more years in prison after being convicted in 2011 on drug-related felony charges, the newspaper added, noting that his street nickname of “Malon” is slang in Spanish for “badass.”

Fox News' Michael Sinkewicz contributed to this report. 

Source: Fox News National

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Confederate monument in N. Carolina cemetery defaced again

A Confederate monument in a North Carolina cemetery has been vandalized.

The News & Observer reports cement or another hard substance was smeared on the monument in Durham's Maplewood Cemetery. Durham police say the vandalism was reported Sunday.

This is at least the second time vandals have defaced the monument created in 2014 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In 2015, "Black Lives Matter" and "Tear It Down" were found painted on the monument.

Another Confederate statue was torn down in 2017 outside a historic Durham courthouse that now houses county offices. And last year, protesters tore down a Confederate monument named "Silent Sam" at UNC-Chapel Hill.

To the northwest, Winston-Salem recently moved a Confederate statue from the grounds of a historic courthouse that has been turned into apartments.

___

Information from: The News & Observer, http://www.newsobserver.com

Source: Fox News National

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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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