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The Latest: Prosecutor cites ‘extreme risk’ in bunker fire

The Latest on the trial of a wealthy stock trader charged with murder in the fire death of a man helping him build tunnels for a nuclear bunker beneath a Maryland home (all times local):

12:50 p.m.

A prosecutor says a wealthy stock trader engaged in "extreme risk-taking behavior" before a fire broke out in his Maryland home and killed a man who was helping him dig tunnels for an underground nuclear bunker.

Montgomery County prosecutor Marybeth Ayres said 27-year-old Daniel Beckwitt didn't cause the fire that killed Askia Khafra but created the conditions that prevented Khafra from escaping the house, which was filled with piles of garbage.

A lawyer for Beckwitt described him as a "very strange young man," yet urged jurors to acquit him of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter charges over the deadly fire. In closing arguments for Beckwitt's trial, defense attorney Robert Bonsib said the September 2017 death of the 21-year-old Khafra is a "mystery without an answer."

Closing arguments are scheduled to resume after a lunch break. Jurors could begin deliberating later Tuesday.

___

1:05 a.m.

A Maryland jury will soon be asked to decide if it was a crime or an accident when a fire killed a man who was helping a millionaire dig tunnels for an underground nuclear bunker.

Jurors are set to hear closing arguments Tuesday in the trial of 27-year-old Daniel Beckwitt. He is charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the September 2017 death of 21-year-old Askia Khafra.

Beckwitt did not testify before prosecutors and defense lawyers finished presenting evidence from witnesses Wednesday.

The fire erupted as Khafra was digging tunnels under Beckwitt's Bethesda home, which was littered with piles of garbage.

During the trial's opening statements, a prosecutor said Beckwitt sacrificed safety for secrecy. Defense attorney Robert Bonsib told jurors the fire was an accident, not a crime.

Source: Fox News National

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Sri Lanka, like world, again sees scourge of suicide bombing

The deadly Easter attacks in Sri Lanka are a bloody echo of decades past in the South Asian island nation, when militants inspired by attacks in the Lebanese civil war helped develop the suicide bomb vest.

Government ministers have said seven Sri Lankans from a little-known local group carried out the six near-simultaneous bombings at churches and hotels that killed at least 290 people and wounded over 500. While little else was known about the group or their motives, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger fighters used suicide bombing in the country's 26-year civil war before being wiped out by government forces.

Similar bombs would then detonate across Israel, wielded by Palestinian militants, and later across the wider Middle East, Africa and Europe by Islamic extremists in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Such attacks strike fear around the world because of their indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, like those eating breakfast at a hotel or worshipping in a church on Easter. Sunday's assault also raises questions about whether the perpetrators had help or experience from abroad.

"I call today the age of the suicide bomber. This is very much a time of extreme acts that have to, in a way, usurp the previous attacks," said Iain Overton, executive director of the London-based group Action on Armed Violence who wrote a book on suicide bombings. "They have to be much more devastating, more impactful, more hurtful, to get as much media headlines as possible."

Experts put the first modern suicide bombing in 1881, when a radical killed Tsar Alexander II of Russia. What may be the first photographs of a suicide bomb vest came in the 1930s when China used them in its war against Imperial Japan around World War II. Japanese kamikaze pilots turned their own planes into weapons.

But the shock of the suicide bomber only struck the minds of many in the West in the 1980s with Lebanon's bloody civil war. Suicide truck bomb attacks struck both the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, and later a U.S. Marine barracks, killing 231 American troops in the bloodiest day for the armed forces since World War II. The U.S. later would blame the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which formed out of Lebanon's civil war, and Iran for the bombings. Both deny involvement.

At that time, however, a small contingent of Tamil fighters was receiving weapons training in Lebanon and took what they learned back to Sri Lanka, Overton said. Their first suicide attack in 1987, in which a bomb-laden truck drove into a Sri Lankan army barracks and killed 55, resembled the U.S. Marine barracks attack.

Over nearly 30 years of civil war, the Tamil Tigers would launch more than 130 suicide bomb attacks, making them the leading militant group in such assaults at the time. They killed a Sri Lankan prime minister and a former Indian prime minister among others, including bystanders. The war ultimately ended in 2009 with the government crushing the Tamil Tigers, with some observers believing that tens of thousands of Tamils died in the last few months of fighting alone.

But while the Tamils were secular nationalists, Islamic extremists in the Middle East would embrace the suicide bomb as a weapon. By the 1990s, Palestinian militants from both Hamas and Fatah would use suicide bombs against Israel. Then al-Qaida under Osama bin Laden would employ them against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and later against the USS Cole off Yemen.

Then came Sept. 11 and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Up until then, there were some 350 suicide attacks worldwide from 1980, said Robert A. Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who directs its Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

The U.S. war in Iraq followed, which fueled bloody sectarian violence that put it on the brink of civil war. Suicide bombers pounded the country. An al-Qaida branch there would morph into the Islamic State group, which would launch its own suicide attacks around the world.

Today, the number of suicide attacks since 1980 is around 6,000, Pape said, with around half in Iraq and Syria alone.

"When we invaded and conquered Iraq, we touched off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times," he said.

Sri Lankan authorities have blamed a local Islamic group, National Thowfeek Jamaath, for the Easter attacks. However, there is no recent history of Muslim extremist attacks in Sri Lanka, a predominantly Buddhist island nation off the southern tip of India. Nor was there any explanation for how a group previously not known for violence could engineer such a massive attack, which experts said resembled an assault by the Islamic State group or al-Qaida.

"What they are seeking to push is this ISIS mantra, which is 'We love death more than they love life,'" Overton said, using an alternate acronym for the militants. "It is the icon of a death cult."

Since the Islamic State group has lost all the territory it once held across Iraq and Syria, there's been more concern among nations about foreign fighters returning home. Sri Lanka's justice minister told parliament in 2016 that 32 Muslims from "well-educated and elite" families had joined the Islamic State group in Syria. It's unclear what happened to them.

"There weren't many, but there don't have to be many," Pape said.

___

Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellap

Source: Fox News World

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Swiss end commercial flights by vintage plane crash airline

Switzerland's aviation agency is revoking the commercial flight license of a local airline that operated vintage propeller planes after one of its aircraft crashed in the Alps last year, killing all 20 people on board.

The Federal Office of Civil Aviation said Tuesday that it reviewed the risks of passenger flights with vintage planes after Ju-Air's 79-year-old Junkers Ju-52 crashed in southeastern Switzerland on Aug. 4. It concluded that continuing commercial flights "no longer fulfills today's safety demands" and said rules elsewhere in Europe are also set to be tightened this year.

The office said that, while Ju-Air can no longer operate commercially, it will — provided it fulfills various conditions — be able to continue private flights for registered members who are aware of the heightened risks.

Source: Fox News World

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German authorities recover bodies from small plane wreck

German authorities have begun recovering the bodies of three people, believed to include one of Russia's richest women, who were killed in a small plane crash Sunday.

The dpa news agency reported Monday that authorities were unable to recover the bodies or examine the charred wreck earlier due to darkness.

Russian airline S7 Group said co-owner Natalia Fileva was aboard the single-engine, six-seat Epic LT aircraft that crashed and burned in a field as it approached the small airport at Egelsbach near Frankfurt. The business publication Forbes.ru has estimated Fileva's fortune at $600 million.

German police have said there were two Russian citizens on board but haven't provided any positive identification of the occupants yet.

The cause of the crash is still unclear.

Source: Fox News World

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Turkish cities could become ‘graveyards’ with building amnesty, engineers say

General view shows the area of Karakoy in Istanbul
A general view shows the area of Karakoy in Istanbul, Turkey, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Umit Bektas

February 26, 2019

By Birsen Altayli and Ceyda Caglayan

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – A Turkish government amnesty on unregistered construction work is endangering lives, engineers and architects warned after an illegally extended residential building collapsed in Istanbul and killed 21 people.

Three floors of the eight-story building had been built illegally, but owners of the property were able to register it under the amnesty that has brought in billions of dollars of revenue for the government.

Experts say the ruins of the building, which crumpled two weeks ago in Istanbul’s Asian district of Kartal, highlight the dangers of approving unregulated construction work in a city of 15 million people that is prone to earthquakes.

Some work has started to address safety concerns, but they say it is concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods, rather than highest risk areas, and the amnesty has exacerbated the peril.

“It will mean transforming our cities, notably Istanbul, into graveyards and result in coffins emerging from our homes,” said Cemal Gokce, the chairman of the Chamber of Civil Engineers.

“Whether it is completely unlicensed, or has more floors than the original plan, they gave an amnesty to all buildings. This is very dangerous,” he said.

Some 10 million people applied to benefit from the amnesty and 1.8 million of the applications were accepted.

Property owners pay to register the buildings, which are then subject to various taxes and levies. The amnesty had brought 16.5 billion lira ($3.1 billion) in property taxes and registration fees into government coffers, the urbanization minister said in December.

His ministry did not respond to Reuters questions about criticism of the property amnesty, which was set to expire at the end of 2018 but has been extended until June.

The government says it was needed to remove disagreements between the state and citizens, as well as to “give legality to these structures by registering them”.

PAYING WITH LIVES

Istanbul Chamber of Architects head Esin Koymen said the chamber had warned the government about the consequences of the amnesty bill when it was debated in parliament.

“We told them to withdraw it. We said people will pay for this with their lives. But they did not listen,” she said, adding that the focus had been on the revenues it would generate rather than architectural, planning or engineering issues.

President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party has put great emphasis on construction, which has helped drive growth during its 16 years in power.

But more than half of Turkey’s building stock, or 13 million buildings, contravenes housing regulations, according to Environment and Urbanisation Ministry data, and many Istanbul residents worry about potential damage from a major earthquake.

A quake in the Izmit region, some 70 km (45 miles) east of the city, killed more than 17,000 people in August 1999.

Erdogan said on Saturday he was “scared” by the prospect of another big earthquake. In an interview with CNN Turk, he blamed the Istanbul building collapse on illegal construction, which he said constituted a threat in all major cities.

According to figures from TSKB Real Estate Appraiser general manager Makbule Yonel Maya, around 32 percent of buildings in Turkey since 2002 were not built in line with legal regulations.

(Writing by Ece Toksabay; Editing by Daren Butler and Alison Williams)

Source: OANN

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Water woes hit henna plant farms in Iraq’s Fao peninsula

Henna for sale is displayed at a market in Basra
Henna for sale is displayed at a market in Basra, Iraq March 9, 2019. REUTERS/Essam al-Sudani

March 17, 2019

By Mohamed Atie and Aref Mohammed

FAO, Iraq (Reuters) – In southern Iraq, where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers meet, the Fao peninsula was once known for its swathes of henna plants and palm trees. But the lush greenery of this Basra province district has now turned into a hardscrabble surface.

Walking past dead palm trees on land so dry it cracks, farmer Abbas Abdul Hassan said water shortages and ensuing use of salty water from the polluted Shatt al-Arab river for irrigation had eaten up areas that grew henna plants, whose ground leaves make the dark paste used as a dye.

“This land was packed with henna plants … the salty water tide killed the henna and killed palm trees,” he said.

Once bearing some 425 farms producing 5,000 kilograms (11,023 lb) of henna leaves annually, mainly for export, that number has now fallen to around 50 farms producing around 300 kilograms, Fao farm owner Fadhil Falih Abdulla said.

Decades of conflict in Iraq, once a major date producer before switching its economic focus from agriculture to oil, have devastated farms.

Its second city Basra has suffered destruction from wars, conflict and neglect since the 1980s. Fao, which lies on the bank of the Shatt al-Arab delta near the Gulf, was hit hard due to its location on the frontline of Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran.

Abdul Atheem Mohammed of Basra’s agriculture office said some 38,000 palm trees had died in the area since 2008.

“Shortages of water which caused the rise of salty water tides hit agriculture hard in Basra and caused the fall in henna farms in Fao,” he said.

A local government project has been trying to revive the plantations in the last two years by setting up a farm in northern Basra. During the collection season – January to April and then May – leaves are reaped every 45 days and sold at local markets.

At a Basra salon, customer Sara Ibrahim described Fao henna as “a heritage”.

“Iraq used to export the henna of Fao to the Gulf countries,” she said as she got her hands decorated with henna. “But it is difficult to get it nowadays.”

(Reporting by Mohammed Atie and Aref Mohammed; Writing by Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian)

Source: OANN

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Cory Booker raises more than $5 million for U.S. presidential run

U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Cory Booker at a Amherst House Party in Amherst New Hampshire
U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Cory Booker campaigns at a Amherst House Party in Amherst, New Hampshire, U.S., April 6, 2019. REUTERS/Mary Schwalm

April 7, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New Jersey Senator Cory Booker raised more than $5 million for his presidential election campaign in February and March, and has more than $6.1 million in cash on hand, his campaign said on Sunday.

That is considerably less than others among the more than 15 Democrats who have announced they are running for the party’s nomination.

U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California raised $12 million in the first three months of 2019 while Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who recently saw a bump in opinion polls but is still considered a long-shot, announced Monday that he had raised $7 million.

Beto O’Rourke, a former U.S congressman from Texas, raised $9.4 million in the first 18 days of his bid for the presidency, his campaign said. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders raised $5.9 million in the first day after announcing his candidacy, and later disclosed he had raised $10 million in a week.

Fundraising has become an early way to prove to donors and potential supporters that a candidate is viable.

Donations to Booker averaged about $34, with 82 percent of the donors new supporters of the candidate, spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said on Twitter.

Candidates are required by law to report all campaign donations, and cannot accept more than $2,800 from a single donor during the primary race.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren has said that her campaign would not hold any formal fundraising events and instead rely solely on “small-dollar” donations, or contributions collected online.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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