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Migrants planning border push clash with police in Greece

Clashes broke out Thursday between migrants and Greek police outside a camp in northern Greece, where hundreds gathered in the hope of reviving a route that saw hundreds of thousands enter more prosperous countries in Europe.

In the wake of anonymous calls on social media for a long trek through heavily guarded Balkan borders, police said more than 500 people, including families with small children, assembled in a cornfield outside the Diavata migrant camp, which is around 10 kilometers (6 miles) west of the city of Thessaloniki.

Some set up tents as dozens more approached on foot.

Later, about 200 clashed with riot police after trying to break through a cordon. They threw stones at police who responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

No injuries or arrests were reported.

Migrants, most of whom have already requested asylum in Greece, said they planned to go to the fenced-off border with North Macedonia 60 kilometers (38 miles) away and try to push through. In early 2016, a similar route was firmly shut down after more than a million people flowed through Greece and the Balkans to Germany and other countries.

The United Nations refugee agency has denounced the social media calls, stressing that irregular border crossings are "risky and dangerous."

In a statement warning of "false information and social media rumors," UNHCR said it does not encourage or support "irregular movements," and noted that states have the right to manage their borders.

"In addition to potential unwanted legal consequences, participants in these movements may end up in dire humanitarian conditions, including being left without adequate shelter, food and other basic services," UNHCR said. "Please do not endanger your lives and the lives of your family members and children."

But people gathering outside the congested Diavata camp said they would try their luck at the border.

"We face very many problems in Greece," Iraqi Kurd Darya Wus, 35, told The Associated Press. "They give us very little money. We have no future (in Greece). My asylum hearing has been set for 2021."

He said migrants would try to get through the border with North Macedonia, despite likely opposition by police in both countries.

"We will try to talk them into letting us go on to Europe," he said.

Sajjad Hamid, 27, an Iraqi from Baghdad who has been in Greece for 15 months after entering illegally from Turkey, was planning to spend the night in a tent with his four young children. They had travelled north by bus from the central town of Halkida, where they lived in a hotel room provided by an NGO.

"We refugees are tired," he said. "We want to leave. There is nothing for us to do here."

More than 70,000 asylum-seekers have been trapped in Greece since the 2016 border closures and a deal between the European Union and Turkey intended to stem migration flows.

___

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Source: Fox News World

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Trump touts success in battling opioid epidemic during Atlanta speech

President Trump on Wednesday touted his administration’s success in combating the opioid epidemic in the United States, while acknowledging that there is still more work to do.

Speaking at the Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta, the president’s remarks noted the steps his administration has taken to battle the epidemic, but also veered into his frequent critique of drugs coming over the U.S.’s southern border into the country.

“We will not solve this epidemic overnight,” Trump said to an audience of elected leaders and health and law enforcement officials gathered in the Georgia capital. “But we will never stop until the job is done.”

Trump added: “We will succeed and we’re making tremendous progress.”

NEW YORK SUES MAKERS OF OXYCONTIN DAYS AFTER COMPANY AGREES TO $270M SETTLEMENT

The president has declared opioids a national health emergency, while First Lady Melania Trump, who also spoke at the conference, focuses on the issue in her national "Be Best" child welfare campaign.

“I’m proud of this administration’s historic progress,” the first lady said before introducing her husband.

Opioid abuse claimed a record nearly 48,000 American lives in 2017. An estimated 2 million people are addicted to the drugs, which include both legal prescription pain medications and illegal drugs like heroin.

There have been signs of progress.The number of prescriptions for opioid painkillers filled in the U.S. fell substantially in 2017. Still, it's unclear whether the opioid problem is on the decline.

Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump's top advisers, said at a White House gaggle Wednesday that Twitter and Google have helped the administration combat the opioid and drug crisis. So far, the administration has helped collect 3.7 million pounds of unused and expired medications — enough to fill seven Air Force One planes, she said.

The next "National Prescription Drug Take Back Day" is Saturday.

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Conway said she met Tuesday with drug enforcement and officials from Google, which is helping the administration by displaying links to about 5,500 locations where people can drop off unused and expired pills.

Trump also hit Mexico for allowing heroin and other opioids to come into the country, and promised that his much-touted border wall will help stem the flow of drugs into the U.S.

“Heroin alone kills 300 Americans, 90 percent of which enter the Southern Border,” Trump said.

While it’s true that the vast majority of heroin in the U.S. comes from Mexico, virtually all of it makes its way into the country through legal ports of entry and not by traffickers sneaking it across the border unnoticed.

“A small percentage of all heroin seized by CBP along the land border was between Ports of Entry (POEs),” the Drug Enforcement Administration said in a 2018 report.

There is also contention over Trump’s claims of progress in combating the opioid epidemic.

Keith Humphreys, a drug policy adviser in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations who now is at Stanford University, said some states are making progress in combating opioids abuse, but not because of Trump's actions. Humphreys cited Rhode Island and Vermont as examples. He also said some states have regressed.

Humphreys said the president's declaration of opioids addiction as a public health emergency in 2017 failed to translate into significant concrete action. Members of Congress, he said, "figured out they were going to have to do it themselves and they did."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Beijing's Forbidden City illuminated for Lantern Festival

Beijing's Forbidden City has been illuminated and opened to the general public for night visits for the first time to celebrate China's Lantern Festival.

As night fell, visitors were welcomed by a light show at the Meridian Gate exhibition hall. A dazzling array of lights also lit up the Supreme Harmony Hall. Chinese characters and traditional decorations were projected on the outer walls.

Along a corridor, the ancient Chinese painting "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" was projected on rooftops.

The Forbidden City, which served as China's political center for more than 500 years, is now known as the Palace Museum. China's Lantern Festival marks the end of Lunar New Year festivities.

Source: Fox News World

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Former Venezuelan general with ‘treasure trove’ of intelligence arrested for drug trafficking

FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's President Maduro embraces retired General Carvajal as they attend the Socialist party congress in Caracas
FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro (R) embraces retired General Hugo Carvajal as they attend the Socialist party congress in Caracas in this picture provided by Miraflores Palace July 27, 2014. REUTERS/Miraflores Palace/Handout via Reuters/File Photo

April 12, 2019

By Silvio Castellanos, Miguel Gutierrez and Roberta Rampton

MADRID/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Spanish police on Friday arrested Hugo Carvajal, a former head of Venezuelan military intelligence, who Washington believes has a “treasure trove” of details he is willing to share about Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Carvajal, a former general and close ally of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, was arrested on drug trafficking charges on a warrant issued by the United States, a police spokeswoman said.

“He is, I would dare to say, the most knowledgeable person to now be outside of Venezuela and be willing and able to cooperate with … a treasure trove of information,” the U.S. administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“He will clearly be cooperating with us. He’s expressed that publicly,” the official said.

A court spokesman said Carvajal would appear before Spain’s High Court on Saturday. The court needs to decide within 24 hours of his arrest whether he will be jailed pending a decision on his extradition or if he will be set free.

The U.S. Justice Department said it had asked Spain to extradite Carvajal to face cocaine-smuggling charges that were filed in 2011 and unsealed in 2014.

Carvajal, head of military intelligence from 2004 to 2008, denounced Chavez’ successor Maduro in February and gave his support to Juan Guaido, who in January invoked the constitution to become Venezuela’s interim president.

Guaido was later recognized by the United States and dozens of governments, but Maduro remains in office with support of the military and has denounced Guaido as a U.S. puppet.

Guaido has offered amnesty to military leaders who took his side.

Carvajal recently said on Twitter that he would relay all the information he knows to the appropriate authorities, the senior U.S. administration official said.

“We look forward to receiving that information and to learning everything he knows … about how Maduro and his mafia operate,” the official said.

Washington expects to learn more about Maduro’s ties to Cuba, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the official said.

The arrest is “very bad news” for Maduro and will provide protection to Carvajal who “probably had a target on his head,” the senior U.S. administration official said.

SECOND ARREST

This was the second time Carvajal has been arrested on the U.S. charges, which allege that he coordinated the transportation of 5,600 kg (1,235 pounds) of cocaine from Venezuela to Mexico in April 2006. That shipment was bound for the United States, according to charges filed in federal court in New York.

Carvajal was arrested on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba in 2014, but the Dutch government accepted Venezuela’s argument that he had diplomatic immunity because he had been nominated consul to Aruba.

Carvajal also was sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2008 for “materially assisting the narcotics trafficking activities” of Colombia’s FARC rebel group.

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said Carvajal’s assistance to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia included protecting drug shipments from seizure by Venezuelan anti-narcotics authorities and providing them with weapons.

Carvajal also provided FARC with official Venezuelan government identification documents that allowed its members to travel to and from Venezuela, OFAC said.

In an interview with the New York Times published in February, Carvajal said any dealings he had with drug traffickers resulted from his role investigating them as intelligence chief.

Carvajal said he had met with FARC members in 2001 to engage them as a government negotiator in the kidnapping of a Venezuelan businessman, a trip that had been approved by presidents in both Venezuela and Colombia.

(Reporting by Silvio Castellanos and Miguel Gutierrez in Madrid and Roberta Rampton and Andy Sullivan in Washington; writing by Angus Berwick; editing by Angus MacSwan and Bill Berkrot)

Source: OANN

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Vietnam arrests 8 Chinese suspected of drug trafficking

Vietnamese police have arrested eight Chinese suspected of drug trafficking after seizing 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of methamphetamine worth up to $26 million.

The state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper says the alleged ring leader was arrested Wednesday when he received the drugs in Ho Chi Minh City from three Vietnamese accomplices who had transported them in a pickup truck from Dak Nong province on the Laos border. It says seven other Chinese were also arrested.

The newspaper says Huang set up a garment factory as a cover for drug trafficking. Authorities believe the drugs originated in Laos and were to be sent to Taiwan in cartons of garments.

Vietnam has some of the world's toughest drug laws. Trafficking more than 100 grams of heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine is punishable by death.

Source: Fox News World

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87, 86: Ages of Bernie, Biden After Serving Two Terms in WH

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden would be 87 and 86 respectively after either of them serve two terms in the White House.

And either of them would enter the Oval Office as the oldest president ever elected if one of them wins the 2020 election, assuming that Biden enters the race as anticipated.

Both of them would be older than Ronald Reagan when he left office.

“There’s no doubt both are vigorous men, but having a president pushing 90 would be a new experience in American politics,” wrote conservative commentator Bryon York. “…For those who respond, ‘Well, what about Trump?’ remember: If the president serves two terms, he will leave the White House at 78, the oldest ever in office. But that is the age Biden would begin his presidency.”

“And Sanders is a year older.”

York also pointed out that although both life could conceivably live to 100, the Social Security Administration suggests that the life expectancy of a 78-year-old man is roughly eight years.

It’s really up to the voters to decide if they would support candidates who are nearing 80, although York argues that many of them would not.

Granted, mainline Democrats aren’t exactly lying up behind either Bernie or Biden despite both of them doing fairly well in Democratic polls, although their concerns aren’t limited to just age.

“All along I’ve been thinking that sooner or later, Democratic primary voters will realize that Joe Biden is not the guy to go mano e mano with Donald Trump in 2020 (too yesteryear, too gaffe-y, peaked in the ’90s and early aughts, pushing 80) and that Bernie Sanders (also pushing 80) had his big groundswell heyday in ’15 and ’16 and that it’s time for everyone to support an eyes-forward, here-and-now candidate like Mayor Pete, Beto O’Rourke or Kamala Harris,” wrote Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells. “Now, suddenly, I’m scared of what Bernie might do — of the trouble he might create.”

“He’s got a lot of money, his supporters have been known to behave like lunatics, and he might really f*ck things up.”

Wells’ statement, however, points to a much larger schism within the Democratic Party, which is also apparent given that there’s around 19 candidates vying for the nomination so far, with a few more expected to enter.



Gerald Celente hosts and gives his expert analysis on the current trends in the economy.

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Kindergarten teacher accused of recording sexually explicit videos with a child, sending them to ex-boyfriend

A kindergarten teacher from Florida is facing jail time for allegedly recording herself sexually abusing a young child and sending the videos to her ex-boyfriend.

Audra Mabel, 34, is now facing child pornography charges after authorities found the videos on ex-boyfriend Justin Ritchie's computer. He was under investigation after a complaint was filed against him for sexually assaulting a child under the age of 12. He also videotaped the alleged assaults, according to reports.

Mabel allegedly sent Ritchie 11 sexually explicit videos of herself, which were made in 2017 while she was living and teaching at a school in Michigan. The child involved in the videos was reportedly not one of her students. However, in one video, Mabel exposes herself to the camera, then turns the camera to reveal what appears to be a classroom full of students, The Detroit Free Press reports.

FLORIDA WOMAN GETS LIFE IN PRISON FOR SITTING ON, SMOTHERING GIRL, 9, AS PUNISHMENT 

Mabel worked at the Lyons School in the Lansing School District in Michigan from November 2016 to June 2017 as a temporary replacement teacher and left at the end of that school year. After that, she reportedly returned to Florida and gained employment at Spring Lake Elementary School in the Seminole County Public School District, just north of Orlando.

In light of the charges against Mabel, the school has fired her and notified parents while clarifying that it does not appear that she committed any crimes with students. They added that parents with any knowledge of inappropriate behavior conducted by her to reach out to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa.

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Mabel and Ritchie are both being held at the Seminole County Jail without bond.

Source: Fox News National

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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