The Democratic National Committee on Monday chose Milwaukee to host their 2020 national convention.
DNC Chairman Tom Perez chose Milwaukee over Miami and Houston. It will be the first time in more than 100 years Democrats will gather in a Midwest city other than Chicago to nominate their presidential candidate.
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
Former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Karen Tandy, said Thursday the southern border of the U.S. is “collapsing” from the immigration crisis.
“Our border is collapsing, plain and simple,” she said on “Fox & Friends.”
“What’s happened is principally Central American families, which consist primarily of one adult and a child, are being encouraged by drug traffickers and smuggling organizations to bring a child and get across a border. And why is that important? Because it’s become a swinging door,” she said.
Tandy said migrants only need to make it across the border before they are released back out into the general population with minimal fuss.
“They get across the border and then they get released into the United States because Customs and Border Protection is doing all they can and doing it valiantly, but there are no transportation services,” she said “There’s none of the services needed either to take care of these endangered children, and they are in danger, or to address the security at the border.”
Tandy also said most illegal immigrant families are released after only 20 days in detention, because the government is running out of space to house them.
“So what happened in 1997, there was a court opinion that held that minors, children are limited to 20 days in detention. So customs and border protection can’t keep them longer than 20 days if they were unaccompanied minors coming across the border,” she said. “What happened after that, more recently in the last year was that the court took that opinion and added on to it, expanded it to also include these family units. So even though the child is accompanied, even though the child has a parent or a guardian with them, the court said you also are limited to 20 days as to these family units.”
“There’s no place to put these people,” Tandy added. “They are surging beyond the wildest numbers and what happens is they get released, they’re given a notice to appear and they disappear into the United States.”
The attention span of the population has been shrinking for decades as the globalists seek even more control over the population. Dr. Nick Begich joins Alex in studio to expose the attack on our minds by Big Tech.
FILE PHOTO: Fire and plumes of smoke are seen during fighting in the Islamic State's final enclave, in the village of Baghouz, Deir Al Zor province, Syria March 11, 2019. REUTERS/Rodi Said
March 15, 2019
DEIR AL-ZOR PROVINCE, Syria (Reuters) – The young Syrian man crossing out of Islamic State’s last enclave in eastern Syria brought confirmation that the fight was still not over despite days of ferocious bombardment by U.S.-backed forces.
“There are people coming out and others not coming out,” said the bearded man wearing a robe and head scarf, one of hundreds of people who left the enclave at Baghouz on Thursday to surrender to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Asked if there were many people still inside, he said “yes” in the footage obtained by Reuters from the Kurdish TV station Ronahi. “I was injured in my back,” said the man originally from the nearby city of Deir al-Zor.
It has been five weeks since the SDF declared the start of its attack on the enclave, a group of villages surrounded by farmland where IS fighters and followers retreated as their “caliphate” was driven from once vast territories.
While Islamic State’s defeat at Baghouz has appeared a foregone conclusion – U.S. President Donald Trump prematurely declared the group “100 percent” beaten on Feb. 28 – the SDF has yet to deal the final blow.
The campaign has stalled to allow for the evacuation of large numbers of people, many of them wives and children of IS fighters. The SDF has evacuated thousands of people from the enclave, adding to the tens of thousands who have crossed out of the diminishing IS territory in the last few months.
The assault has also been complicated by resistance from hardened jihadists holed up inside seeking a fight to the death.
A big push this week has met with counter attacks involving groups of suicide bombers who had survived intensive artillery bombardments and air strikes by a U.S.-led international coalition.
MINES, BOMBS, TUNNELS, SHELTERS
More women and children emerged from the enclave on Thursday along with wounded men, many of them limping, with crutches or propped up by walking sticks as they hobbled along a dirt track out of the remaining IS area.
Some of the women, fully veiled and dressed head-to-toe in black, carried babies wrapped in blankets.
The SDF believes Islamic State has dug extensive tunnels and shelters, tactics it used in places such as Raqqa, its former Syrian headquarters that the SDF captured in 2017.
“The numbers that came out in the last 20 or 25 days were truly a surprise,” SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel said.
“The reality we have seen shows the extent of preparations by Daesh for this last battle,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
“You have the mines, the bombs, the tunnels and shelters. We don’t see the enemy in front of us.”
The SDF has said it is proceeding cautiously in Baghouz to avoid losses and the fighting continued on Friday, with machine-gun battles and shelling.
“The operations will take the time needed to … completely eliminate Daesh,” Gabriel said.
U.S. envoy James Jeffrey said Islamic State was down to its last few hundred fighters and less than a square kilometer of land in the battle, although it may have 15,000-20,000 adherents in Syria and Iraq.
(Additional reporting by a Reuters journalist in Deir al-Zor province and Tom Miles in Geneva; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Brazil's state-run Petrobras oil company is seen on a tank in at Petrobras Paulinia refinery in Paulinia, Brazil July 1, 2017. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker/File Photo
April 17, 2019
By Marta Nogueira, Rodrigo Viga Gaier and Luciano Costa
RIO DE JANEIRO/SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilian state-run oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA is completely free of political interference and is examining divesting a wide range of assets, including its fuel distribution unit, executives said on Wednesday.
In an impromptu press conference at the Rio de Janeiro headquarters of Petrobras, as the firm is known, Chief Executive Roberto Castello Branco announced a diesel price hike of 10 cents per liter and said the company has complete control over its pricing strategy.
Speaking at an event in Sao Paulo only minutes before, Chief Financial Officer Rafael Grisolia said the firm was looking at selling off assets such as deepwater pipelines and Petrobras Distribuidora SA, which includes a gas station chain stretching across the country.
The comments come as executives scramble to contain the fallout of a Friday incident, in which the firm canceled a diesel price hike at the behest of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, stirring fears of political interference and tanking Petrobras shares.
While Bolsonaro´s government has promised a hands-off approach to Petrobras, investors are wary of a return to policies enacted under past administrations, in which the company was forced to sell fuel at a discount to international rates.
On Tuesday, Bolsonaro´s spokesman and Economy Minister Paulo Guedes sought to characterize the canceled price hike as a one-time error that would not be repeated.
PIPES AND PUMPS
Petrobras is analyzing the best model for selling three offshore natural gas pipelines, CFO Grisolia said, including whether they will be sold individually or in a package.
Grisolia also said the oil company would “probably” reduce its stake in Petrobras Distribuidora to below 50 percent from the current 71 percent, effectively privatizing the unit through a secondary share offering.
Investors have cheered the firm’s recent push to cut debt and refocus on oil exploration and production via an aggressive divestment program.
Reuters reported earlier this month that Petrobras was preparing to sell three more gas pipelines after successfully selling its larger TAG unit to France’s Engie for $8.6 billion.
Reuters reported on Tuesday the company had hired nine banks to manage Petrobras Distribuidora’s share offering.
(Reporting by Marta Nogueira and Rodrigo Viga Gaier in Rio de Janeiro and Luciano Costa in Sao Paulo; Writing by Gram Slattery and Tatiana Bautzer; Editing by Peter Cooney and Cynthia Osterman)
President Donald Trump told House Republicans on Tuesday that they need to embrace health care reform and make it the first thing they vote on following the 2020 election.
Speaking at an annual fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Trump told GOP lawmakers and supporters they have the advantage on a variety of issues, but conceded that Democrats have the advantage on health care.
"We have to take that away from them," Trump said.
"We blew it the last time, man I was fed a bill of goods," Trump said.
"Republicans should not run away from health care," he added. "You can't do it. You're going to get clobbered."
He told the GOP House members: "You are the minority, I hate to say. That's not going to last long." Democrats hold a 235-197 majority in the House with three vacancies.
The Democrats found success in 2018 by attracting support from women, minorities and college-educated voters, particularly in suburban districts. Many wanted a check on the president. That success filtered down to state and local races, with Democrats flipping hundreds of seats in state legislatures and picking up seven governorships.
To turn that momentum, Trump is focusing on the economy and casting Democrats as outside the mainstream in their support for policies such as "Medicare for all" and the "Green New Deal" to combat climate change.
"If they beat me with the Green New Deal, I deserve to lose," he said.
The buzzword for Republicans is "socialism," and Trump turned to it on several occasions Tuesday night.
Still, he said some of the Democrats' proposals could prove enticing to votes in the short term. He said free health care sounds very seductive.
"Don't underestimate the power of socialism to get a vote," Trump said.
ANKARA, Turkey – Turkey's top electoral authority has rejected a request by the ruling party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a full recount of votes in the Istanbul mayoral race.
Recep Ozel, a member of the Supreme Electoral Board, said early Tuesday that the electoral authority has, however, allowed a recount of 51 ballot boxes in the city. The board was still to rule on a demand for a re-run of the vote in one Istanbul district.
Erdogan's party suffered a major setback in the country's March 31 local elections. Opposition candidates won in Turkey's capital, Ankara, and squeezed out Erdogan's party in Istanbul.
The ruling party has demanded a recount, maintaining that the elections were marred by irregularities. The opposition denounced the claim as a ploy to secure a re-run.
MADISON, Wis. – A 24-year-old Wisconsin man stepped forward Tuesday to claim a $768 million Powerball jackpot, the nation's third-largest, saying he "pretty much felt lucky" the day he bought his tickets.
Manuel Franco, of West Allis, said he was sorting through $10 worth of quick-pick tickets after the March 27 drawing and thought he had checked all his tickets. Then he saw one last ticket stuck to another one, and recounted to reporters the feeling as he matched the first two numbers, then glanced at the Powerball to see it matched too.
"I was going insane," Franco said. "I looked back at the three other numbers, they all matched. My heart started racing, my blood started pumping, I felt warm. I started screaming."
Franco declined to reveal much about himself at a news conference conducted by Wisconsin Lottery officials, smiling often but deflecting questions such as what he did for a living and what kind of car he drives. Franco did say he quit work the second day after winning, saying he just couldn't continue.
He said he would take a lump sum payment, hoped to make some charitable contributions and was prepared for people who might come asking for money.
"I'm ready and I know how to say no," Franco said.
Under Wisconsin law, winners cannot remain anonymous.
The winning ticket was sold on March 27 at a Speedway gas station in the Milwaukee suburb of New Berlin, a city of about 40,000 people roughly 14 miles (23 kilometers) southwest of Milwaukee.
The $768 million prize refers to an annuity option paid over 29 years. The winner also can choose a $477 million cash option. Nearly all grand prize winners opt for the cash prize. The gas station will receive $100,000 for selling the winning ticket.
The jackpot is the third-largest behind the world record $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot shared by winners in California, Florida and Tennessee in January 2016 and a $1.5 billion Mega Millions jackpot won in South Carolina last October.
Wisconsin Department of Revenue officials estimated that if the winner takes the cash prize the state would claim $38 million of the winnings as tax revenue. Annual tax revenue from annuities would build from $11.6 million this year to $47 million by 2048.
The win comes almost exactly two years after Wisconsin hit its last Powerball jackpot, when a Milwaukee resident won $156.2 million on March 22, 2017.
The odds of matching all six balls in the Powerball drawing were 1 in 292.2 million. The winning numbers were 16, 20, 37, 44 and 62.
Seven tickets matched all five white balls but missed matching the red Powerball to win a $1 million prize. Those tickets were sold in Arizona, two in California, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey and New York. Two other tickets sold in Kansas and Minnesota matched all five white balls and doubled the prize to $2 million since the tickets included the Power Play option for an additional $1.
Powerball is played in 44 states as well as Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
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.”
The U.S. government say Butina was part of an unofficial influence campaign that overlapped with the 2016 presidential election and targeted conservatives; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from the U.S. district court in Washington.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].”
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.
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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, 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)
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