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US durable goods orders fall 1.6% in February

Orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods fell 1.6% in February, the biggest drop in four months, reflecting a plunge in the volatile commercial aircraft category. Demand in a key sector used to track business investment decisions also declined in February.

The Commerce Department said Tuesday that the February decline came after a small 0.1% rise January and was the weakest showing since a 4.3% fall in October. Orders in a category that serves as a proxy for business investment plans edged down 0.1% in February after a 0.9% advance in January.

The manufacturing sector has been strained for the past few months, reflecting a global economic slowdown and rising trade tensions which have hurt U.S. exports. But there have been more hopeful signs recently.

Source: Fox News National

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Business jet deliveries rise 3.8 percent in 2018: industry group

FILE PHOTO: An interior view of Bombardier's Global 7500, the first business jet to have a queen-sized bed and hot shower, is shown during a media tour in Montreal
FILE PHOTO: An interior view of Bombardier's Global 7500, the first business jet to have a queen-sized bed and hot shower, is shown during a media tour in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, December 19, 2018. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi/File Photo

February 20, 2019

(Reuters) – Business jet deliveries worldwide rose 3.8 percent on an annual basis to 703 planes in 2018, lifted by demand from North America and the introduction of new models, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) said on Wednesday.

Forecasters and corporate plane makers expect higher business jet deliveries in 2019, fueled by the recent entry into service of new aircraft like Bombardier’s Global 7500 and U.S. rival Gulfstream’s G500.

Demand for business jets has slowly rebounded following slumping sales after the 2009 global economic crisis.

Deliveries are a closely watched metric since that is the point when customers pay the bulk of the cost of a new plane.

General aviation aircraft deliveries rose across all segments in 2018 for the first time in five years, helped by demand for new models, GAMA said.

Global airplane deliveries increased to 2,443 planes in 2018, up 4.7 percent on an annual basis, according to data from Washington-based GAMA. Rotorcraft deliveries rose 5.4 percent to 976 aircraft.

“This is the first year since 2013 that we’ve seen all segments up in deliveries,” said GAMA President and Chief Executive Pete Bunce in a statement.

The “impacts” of a 35-day, partial U.S. government shutdown that ended on Jan. 25 are “still being felt and assessed,” GAMA said. The shutdown affected the certification program for Gulfstream’s new G600 corporate plane.

(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal; Editing by Tom Brown)

Source: OANN

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Trump done playing ‘nice’ at the border; Biden has potential ‘Creepy Uncle Joe’ problem #MAGAFirstNews w/ @PeterBoykin

Trump done playing 'nice' at the border; Biden has potential 'Creepy Uncle Joe' problem #MAGAFirstNews w/ @PeterBoykin TRUMP: NO MORE PLAYING 'NICE' AT THE BORDER - President Trump has threatened to shut down the southern border this week to combat the illegal immigration crisis and in a tweet sent Sunday night, he suggested he was done playing Mr. Nice Guy ... "The Democrats are allowing a ridiculous asylum system and major loopholes to remain as a mainstay ... See More of our immigration system," Trump tweeted. "Mexico is likewise doing NOTHING, a very bad combination for our Country. Homeland Security is being sooo very nice, but not for long!" Meanwhile, Trump has also vowed to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as their citizens flee north toward the U.S. in caravans. Mexican officials said Sunday they will give out humanitarian visas on a "limited basis" to some of the roughly 2,500 Central American and Caribbean migrants gathered in the southern state of Chiapas.

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BNY Mellon profit falls 20 percent on lower fee revenue

The Bank of New York Mellon Corp. building at 1 Wall St. is seen in New York's financial district
FILE PHOTO: The Bank of New York Mellon Corp. building at 1 Wall St. is seen in New York's financial district March 11, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

April 17, 2019

(Reuters) – Bank of New York Mellon Corp reported a 20 percent fall in quarterly profit on Wednesday, as the world’s largest custodian bank’s fee revenue declined.

The bank said net income applicable to common shareholders fell to $910 million, or 94 cents per share, in the first quarter ended March 31, from $1.14 billion, or $1.10 per share, a year earlier. (https://reut.rs/2ZlhuuP)

Total revenue fell 6.7 percent to $3.90 billion.

(Reporting by Bharath Manjesh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)

Source: OANN

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Capital Gazette’s Pulitzer citation: ‘rollercoaster moments’

The editor of the Capital Gazette of Maryland said Monday that his staff experienced some "rollercoaster moments" as it won a special Pulitzer Prize citation for its coverage and courage in the face of a massacre in its own newsroom.

The Gazette, based in the Maryland state capital of Annapolis, published on schedule the day after the shooting attack that claimed five staffers' lives. It was one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history. The man charged in the attack had a longstanding grudge against the paper.

Rick Hutzell, editor of Capital Gazette Communications, said the paper had submitted entries for five categories, including a joint entry with The Baltimore Sun for breaking news. Although the Gazette didn't win in any of those five categories, the Pulitzer board awarded it the citatioin together with an extraordinary $100,000 grant to further its journalism.

Hutzell said he thought the Pulitzer judges handled the decision admirably.

"Clearly, there were a lot of mixed feelings," Hutzell said. "No one wants to win an award for something that kills five of your friends."

He also said the paper was aware it would be facing stiff competition.

"It's very difficult when you are reporting in some ways on yourself," he said. "That's not what we do. We're behind the camera, not in front of it."

Five newspaper employees — John McNamara, Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Gerald Fischman and Rob Hiaasen — were killed in the attack last June 28 . The shooting didn't stop other staffers from covering it and putting out a newspaper the next day, with assistance from colleagues at The Baltimore Sun, which is owned by the same company.

Jarrod Ramos, the man charged in the newsroom shooting, had a history of harassing the newspaper's journalists. He filed a lawsuit against the paper in 2012, alleging he was defamed in an article about his conviction in a criminal harassment case in 2011. The suit was dismissed as groundless.

County police arrested Ramos in the newsroom. They said he blocked an exit and then used a shotgun to blast his way through the entrance.

Ramos' trial is scheduled to start in November. He pleaded not guilty last year to first-degree murder charges. April 29 is the deadline for attorneys to change his plea to not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.

In October, the National Press Foundation announced that Hutzell won the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year Award . The award was established in 1984 to recognize imagination, professional skill, ethics and an ability to motivate staff.

In December, the newspaper's staff was included by Time magazine among its 2018 Person of the Year honorees.

Source: Fox News National

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Bitcoin trading volume hits two-year low in March: report

FILE PHOTO: A bitcoin logo is seen at a facility of the Youth and Sports Ministry in Caracas
FILE PHOTO: A bitcoin logo is seen at a facility of the Youth and Sports Ministry in Caracas, Venezuela February 23, 2018. REUTERS/Marco Bello

April 4, 2019

By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Bitcoin’s trading volume dropped to a two-year low in March, digital currency trading tool provider TradeBlock said in a report on Thursday, as investors remained spooked by increased regulatory scrutiny.

Bitcoin volume in the top five digital currency exchanges totaled $2.14 billion last month, the lowest since April 2017 when volume was just $845.7 million.

The original cryptocurrency, bitcoin has dropped more than 70 percent since hitting an all-time high of nearly $20,000 in December 2017, a slump that has spread to all digital currencies.

A global regulatory crackdown led by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has created concerns about greater oversight and acceptance of digital currencies as payments, taking the wind out of the once red-hot virtual assets.

Early this week, however, bitcoin recovered somewhat to hit a roughly five-month high of $5,345 on the Bitstamp platform, after a major order by an anonymous buyer set off a frenzy of computer-driven trading, analysts said.

TradeBlock said in its research that as bitcoin trading volumes fell, digital asset exchanges started increasing the number of assets listed. It cited Coinbase, which has historically listed fewer assets than its peers, taking on two new currencies – Ripple and Stellar Lumens – over the last few months.

Coinbase’s trading volume for March was $1.6 billion, a two-year low as well, TradeBlock data showed.

TradeBlock’s research also showed that as volumes declined, digital currency exchanges began raising trading fees in 2018 and 2019.

“An increase in trading fees is in line with expectations that exchanges are looking to protect revenues, amidst continually dampened trading volumes,” TradeBlock said.

(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Source: OANN

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Feinstein, Blumenthal lead Dem pressure on Boeing after deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash

Two top Democratic U.S. senators called on Boeing to ground all 737 Max 8 planes operating in the United States while the deadly weekend crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet is investigated, while the head of the House Transportation Committee said Monday that he would "think twice" about boarding the aircraft in the future.

All 157 people on board were killed after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 went down in clear weather shortly after takeoff Sunday morning outside Addis Ababa. The crash was similar to that of a Lion Air jet of the same model that plummeted into the Java Sea off Indonesia on Oct. 29 of last year, killing all 189 people on board.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., told Fox News on Monday that the two tragedies were "eerily similar ... in terms of the unusual climb and the dive."

"I would think twice about getting on the plane, truthfully," he added. "I'm not going to be dishonest here."

Following the crash, all airlines in Ethiopia, China and Indonesia grounded their Max 8s, as did Caribbean carrier Cayman Airways, Comair in South Africa and Royal Air Maroc in Morocco. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., called on Boeing to follow suit in the U.S.

US AIRLINES 'CLOSELY MONITORING' ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES INVESTIGATION AFTER CHINA, INDONESIA GROUND BOEING 737 MAX 8 JETS

"Until the cause of the [Ethiopian Airlines] crash is known and it’s clear that similar risks aren’t present in the domestic fleet, I believe all Boeing 737 Max 8 series aircraft operating in the United States should be temporarily grounded," Feinstein said in a letter to acting Federal Aviation Administration chief Dan Elwell. "This aircraft model represents only a small fraction of the domestic fleet, and several other countries have already taken this important step."

Blumenthal said in a statement that the two "catastrophic accidents" involving the Max 8 "call into serious question the safety of these airplanes. The FAA and the airline industry must act quickly and decisively to protect American travelers, pilots and flight attendants. These planes must be grounded immediately and airlines should work expeditiously to minimize disruption and accommodate customers whose travel is impacted."

In an email to employees made public earlier Monday, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg wrote: "We are confident in the safety of the 737 MAX and in the work of the men and women who design and build it."

The FAA tried to discourage comparisons between Sunday's crash and the Lion Air disaster. While noting that "[e]xternal reports are drawing similarities between [the accidents]," the agency said, "this investigation has just begun and to date we have not been provided data to draw any conclusions or take any actions."

In an earlier statement, the FAA said it would take "immediate and appropriate action" if it identified an ongoing safety issue.

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DeFazio told Fox News that "heads will roll" at the FAA "if they're not confident in their data and the safety of this plane."

"They're not supposed to be promoting [aviation]," DeFazio said. "They tell me they are confident in their data and their simulations. That's the best I can do right now."

Fox News' Mike Emanuel, Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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Source: InfoWars

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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