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U.S. Senate confirms Abizaid as ambassador to Saudi Arabia

FILE PHOTO: Foreign Relations Committee holds U.S. Saudi ambassador confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington
FILE PHOTO: Retired four-star Army General John Abizaid testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearing to be U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 6, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

April 10, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to confirm retired General John Abizaid as the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, filling a vital position vacant since President Donald Trump took office more than two years ago.

The Senate voted 92 to seven for the 68-year-old retired four-star Army general, who led U.S. Central Command during the Iraq war.

Washington has not had an ambassador in Riyadh since January 2017, a 27-month period in which U.S.-Saudi ties have become increasingly complicated over issues including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist, at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Many in Washington have called for a tougher stance against the Saudis on matters such as the imprisonment and alleged torture of women’s rights activists and other dissidents, and the killings of civilians by aircraft from the Saudi-led coalition in the Yemen War.

Trump nominated Abizaid for the position in November 2018.

Despite intense criticism of Saudi Arabia from his fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, Trump has expressed reluctance to push too hard on Riyadh. He cites its multibillion-dollar purchases of U.S. military equipment and investments in U.S. firms, as well as its role as an important regional counterbalance to Iran, arch-rival of U.S. ally Israel.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Tom Brown)

Source: OANN

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Eric Trump praises Barr testimony, says spying ‘did occur’: ‘You finally have a grown up in the room’

Eric Trump says it is good to "finally have a grown up in the room", as he backed up Attorney General William Barr’s testimony this week and said spying "did occur".

Trump, joined by his wife Lara who is pregnant with their second child, made the statement in an interview on "Fox & Friends" Friday.

“The nice thing about Barr, is you finally have a grown up in the room,” Trump said. “You finally have a grown up in the room who calls out this nonsense because, you know, my father always went around during the campaign, he talked about the deep state. The deep state, guys, does exist. By the way, it still exists, but it does exist and it did exist. You see all the emails between FBI people about insurance policies and other things. You see dossiers that were paid for by political candidates, that were leaked through people's wives. It's really incredible.”

Lara Trump added: “But guess who the first person is who called them out? Donald Trump way back when and he’s always right. You might not like it when he says it, but he’s always right.”

Eric and Lara's comments come two days after Barr testified that he believes "spying did occur" on the Trump campaign in 2016, as he vowed to review the conduct of the FBI's original Russia probe -- and the focus of a related internal review shifted to the role of a key FBI informant.

DEMS RAGE AGAINST BARR FOR BACKING CLAIMS OF TRUMP CAMPAIGN 'SPYING' BY FBI 

Prominent Democrats lined up to hammer Barr for testifying that federal authorities had spied on the Trump campaign in 2016.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told Fox News that Barr's loyalties were compromised.

"He is acting as an employee of the president," Hoyer said. "I believe the Attorney General believes he needs to protect the president of the United States."

Added House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., "I don't trust Barr, I trust Mueller."

But Eric Trump continued: “It was interesting, the day after the Barr report came out, you go on all the channels, you’re watching CNN, not that I watch CNN or MSNBC, ‘Well we don't care about Russia. We want to talk about health care.’ I go, ‘How disingenuous is this?’ You've been talking about Russia for the last three years, all day, every day then all of a sudden it comes out that the whole thing is a hoax, which is what my father, and myself, and Lara, and Don, and Ivanka and everybody else have been saying and all of a sudden they want to talk about health care. “This is why they're going to lose. This is why they're going to lose in 2020.”

MEDIA TAKE ISSUE WITH AG BARR FOR SAYING 'SPYING DID OCCUR' ON TRUMP CAMPAIGN

On “Fox & Friends”, Lara Trump said Trump's re-election campaign raised about $60 million and combined with the Republican National Committee that number is close to $200 million.

The couple also addressed the topic of Immigration Friday, one of the president’s core issues.

Pelosi stated Thursday she wants to find common ground on immigration saying, “I’m not giving up on the president on this… this has to happen. It’s inevitable.”

In response, Eric said: “That’s their M.O. (modus operandi), ‘he’s (President Trump’s) a racist, he’s a sexist,’ all the things that he’s exactly not

“Just Imagine how effective that we could be as a country, if you actually had people who are willing to work together. I know that’s a utopian view, but if you sat down and really cared about prescription drug prices, something that is on top of my father's mind every single day, or you cared about solving the problem at the southern border, you know you see all these incredible border patrol agents, and they always invite them, ‘Ms. Pelosi, please, please come down. You keep saying there is no problem at our southern border, come down, do one shift with me. Ride in the right seat of my car for one shift, and you won't be saying that there is not a problem.’”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

He added: “If there truly was sincerity to fix the problem, it could be done but the problem is, they just, they don't want my father to accomplish anything.”

Source: Fox News Politics

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‘Moderate’ a dirty word? 2020 Dems cringe at being labeled less than liberal

Sen. Amy Klobuchar is highlighting her work bridging the political divide as she embarks on a 2020 presidential campaign – just don't call her a "moderate."

The day after the Minnesota Democrat declared her candidacy, she pushed back against the label, telling Rachel Maddow, “I think [voters] should see me as a progressive because I believe in progress and I have worked towards progress my whole life.”

KLOBUCHAR DISMISSES LIBERAL LABEL

The senator then touted a litany of "progressive" accomplishments during her years in Washington and at the state level.

The response underscored how even those candidates considered within the party's center-left are reluctant to be seen as somehow ignoring the wishes of the – vocal and influential – liberal base. The label "moderate" is scorned, avoided as a potentially fatal term in a primary campaign stacked with left-wing heavyweights like Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey, who speak glowingly of big-government policies like the Green New Deal. Most recently, populist firebrand Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Tuesday launched his second straight bid for the Democratic nomination. And progressive champions Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon may soon join the 2020 melee.

Self-described centrists are few and far between. What is emerging is a field where candidates who might otherwise brand themselves moderates are pushing a message of unity while still highlighting their "progressive" bona fides -- or, in the case of once-moderate-leaning figures like Beto O'Rourke or Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, openly aligning themselves with the party's left flank.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a possible 2020 candidate, pushed back on the "moderate" label during a visit to New Hampshire last week. “I think in many ways I’m more progressive than a lot of these other folks. We’re actually getting it done,” he said.

Last week, former Rep. O’Rourke of Texas, who appears to be leaning toward a presidential bid, called for tearing down existing wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in his home town of El Paso. His push may have been a move to highlight his progressive credentials, following coverage of his voting record in Congress which was more conservative than the average Democrat's.

Asked about O'Rourke's comments, Gillibrand signaled a willingness to consider the idea. The New York senator years ago was known for pro-Second Amendment views and strong opposition to illegal immigration. She has since backed calls to eliminate Immigration and Customs Enforcement, telling "60 Minutes" last year she's "ashamed" of her past immigration stance.

“It’s clear at this early stage that the most energy is around progressive candidates,” said Wayne Lesperance, New England College vice president of academic affairs and a political science professor.

DEM HOPEFULS SHIFT TO THE LEFT

Lesperance has seen many of the candidates in action as they’ve made their way in recent weeks through the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire. He argued that “self-proclaimed moderates have a tougher path to navigate. And those who have taken moderate positions in the past find themselves having to explain those positions -- never a good place to be while running.”

Defending such accomplishments that may not sit well with the increasingly liberal progressive base may be an issue for former Vice President Joe Biden, who’s seriously mulling a White House run. While he’s credited with pushing progressive policies during his years as vice president, his more conservative record in the Senate may not play well on the 2020 campaign trail.

The percentage of Democrats identifying as liberal averaged 51 percent in 2018, according to Gallup polling. That’s up from 50 percent in 2017, marking the first time a majority of Democrats have adopted this term, following gradual increases since the 1990s.

But there may still be an opening for a moderate. The Gallup survey found that 47 percent of Democrats still identify as moderate or conservative. And the survey indicated that a majority of Democrats and independents who lean toward the party would like to see the party move more to the center.

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg appears to have no issues being labeled a moderate or centrist. The billionaire media mogul who’s contributed millions to fight for gun safety and battling climate change recently took aim at the Green New Deal, "Medicare-for-all" and other progressive proposals during a recent stop in New Hampshire, as he weighs launching a presidential campaign.

The Democrat turned Republican turned independent, who returned to the Democratic Party last year, called for “realistic” proposals that could win support from both Democrats and Republicans.

DELANEY TAKES AIM AT GREEN NEW DEAL

Count former three-term Rep. John Delaney of Maryland in that camp.

With many of his rivals for the nomination running to the left, Delaney highlights how he’s carving a more moderate path. And he’s taking aim at both the Green New Deal and "Medicare-for-all."

At a speech last week at "Politics and Eggs," a must stop for White House hopefuls campaigning in New Hampshire, Delaney called for a “sense of common purpose and unity” and described himself as a centrist, “which I don’t think is a dirty word.”

Asked by Fox News if many of the other Democratic White House hopefuls are too far to the left, Delaney said: “I think I’m the only one running as a problem solver. And I think there are two ways to seek the presidency. You can try to divide and create some goals that are unrealistic. I think that’s wrong … or you can actually try to unify the country.”

But Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson pushed back against labeling the contenders as progressive or moderate.

Ferguson, who was a senior spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, told Fox News that "voters are far more concerned with who you're going to stand up for and why you're going to do it than they are with any label you're given. They want to connect with a candidate, believe what they are saying and see them as the antidote to Trump.”

“Voters don't care what labels get pushed onto candidates because those labels don't reflect the ideologies at play anymore,” he emphasized.

Source: Fox News Politics

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WVa police officer accused of stalking is released from jail

A West Virginia police officer accused of stalking an underage girl has posted bail and been released from custody.

News outlets report 29-year-old Bethlehem police Officer Daniel Eastham was arrested last week and released from custody Tuesday. He's not allowed near the school or girl.

A police report says the mother of the Ohio County student told Eastham in November to leave her daughter alone. She also got a restraining order against him that was set to expire in September.

The report says he appeared at the school in January with gifts for the girl, who the report says was "visibly shaken and upset." The student said Eastham would visit the school to "spy" on her.

Eastham is charged with stalking and violation of a protective order.

Source: Fox News National

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Cummings: Ivanka Trump not preserving all official email

WASHINGTON -- A top House Democrat says Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and a powerful White House aide, is not preserving all of her official email communications as required by federal law.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, says in a letter that Trump's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, informed the committee late last year that she doesn't preserve official email she receives in her personal account if she doesn't respond to it.

Cummings says that appears to violate the Presidential Records Act.

The Maryland Democrat also says Lowell confirmed that her husband, Jared Kushner, uses the messaging application WhatsApp to conduct official U.S. government business.

CNN reported last year that Kushner was communicating with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman using the application.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Student suspended after using toy gun in veterans memorial

Military veterans and students are upset over the suspension of a middle school student in Ohio whose class project creating a memorial to veterans included a toy gun.

About two dozen people in Celina (suh-LEYE'-nuh) in northwest Ohio protested the suspension earlier this week.

The Daily Standard reports eighth-grader Tyler Carlin made a replica of a battlefield cross that included a toy gun painted black.

An attorney for the boy says his teacher gave him permission to bring the project to school.

But the attorney says Tyler was sent to the principal's office when he carried the memorial into school and suspended for bringing something resembling a dangerous weapon to school.

School officials have declined to comment on the suspension, saying they would need permission from the boy's family.

___

Information from: The Daily Standard, http://www.dailystandard.com

Source: Fox News National

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Motor racing: Vettel seeks Ferrari boost in Bahrain

Formula One - Australian Grand Prix
Formula One F1 - Australian Grand Prix - Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit, Melbourne, Australia - March 14, 2019 Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel poses for a photo REUTERS/Edgar Su

March 27, 2019

By Abhishek Takle

MANAMA (Reuters) – Sebastian Vettel will be aiming for his third successive Bahrain Grand Prix win on Sunday as Ferrari seek to show their lack of pace in Formula One’s Australian season opener was a one-off.

Tipped as pre-season favorites, the German and new team mate Charles Leclerc finished fourth and fifth in Melbourne, nearly a minute behind the dominant race-winning Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas.

Albert Park can be seen as something of an outlier but Ferrari hope the more traditional layout of Bahrain’s 5.4-km Sakhir desert track will allow them to unlock the full potential of the SF90 car.

The most successful team in Bahrain, with six wins overall, can draw encouragement from last year when Mercedes were faster in Australia only for Ferrari to turn the tables with a front-row lockout and victory for Vettel.

That also started a streak of three straight pole positions for the German.

“In Bahrain, we expect to see the effect of the corrections we have made …,” said principal Mattia Binotto, who replaced Maurizio Arrivabene at the helm before the start of the season.

“We are well aware that our competitors will once again be very strong. With that in mind, we are keen to get back on track and face up to them.”

Bottas, having driven what he described as the race of his life in Australia to finish more than 20 seconds ahead of team mate Lewis Hamilton in second place, will be keen to serve up a thriller under the floodlights.

Having come within a second of snatching victory from Vettel last year, Bottas has some unfinished business on Sunday while Hamilton, who has taken two of Mercedes’ three wins in Bahrain, will be keen to reassert his supremacy.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said nothing was won or lost at Albert Park.

“Whatever the Melbourne result says, our mindset hasn’t changed since then,” he said.

“We’ve seen the potential of Ferrari’s package in Barcelona (testing), so we expect them to come back strong in Bahrain, with Red Bull in the mix as well.”

Max Verstappen finished third for Red Bull in Australia, the Milton Keynes-based team’s first race with new engine partners Honda.

Frenchman Pierre Gasly, now driving alongside Verstappen, finished fourth for Honda-powered Toro Rosso in Bahrain last year and will be hoping to do even better on Sunday.

McLaren, which counts Bahrain’s Mumtalakat Holding Company among its major shareholders, will be looking for their first points after Lando Norris finished 12th and Carlos Sainz retired in Australia.

Bahrain will also mark the start of the Formula Two Championship with Mick Schumacher, son of seven-times Formula One champion Michael and nephew of Ralf, making his debut in the support category.

Schumacher, a part of Ferrari’s young driver academy, is also scheduled to take part in a post-race test with Ferrari and Alfa Romeo.

(Editing by Alan Baldwin/Peter Rutherford)

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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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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