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Woolsey to Newsmax TV: Brennan's Trump Treason Claim Like '13th Chime of a Clock'

Former CIA director James Woolsey said unfounded claims by former members of the intelligence community that President Donald Trump is guilty of conspiring with the Russians is as perplexing as a clock chiming for a 13th time.

Woolsey was on Newsmax TV's "Newsmax Now" Wednesday night and was asked specifically about former CIA director John Brennan, who has insisted for two years that Trump colluded with the Russians. It was unveiled last weekend that special counsel Robert Mueller came to the opposite conclusion.

"I think it hurts generally when you accuse someone of something as serious as essentially aide and comfort to the enemy of the United States, and you don't have any evidence to that effect," Woolsey said. "And then it turns out, as it looks right now, they don't have evidence.

"That's like the 13th chime of a clock. It's bizarre in and of itself, and it calls into question everything from the same source."

Woolsey added that Trump's repeated criticisms of the late Sen. John McCain are also similar to a clock's extra tone, and then added that Americans should return to using facts as supporting evidence for discussion, rather than opinions.

"I wish we could have a more civil and fair-minded and evidence-based statement of people's objectives and policies, rather than the kind of thing we saw, falsely apparently, claiming treason," he said.

Important: Newsmax TV is now carried in 65 million cable homes on DirecTV Ch. 349, Dish Network Ch. 216, Comcast/Xfinity Ch. 1115, U-verse Ch. 1220, FiOS Ch. 615 or More Systems Here.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Brexit de-escalation? How Wednesday’s parliamentary debate will work

An anti-Brexit protester stands opposite the Houses of Parliament in London
An anti-Brexit protester stands opposite the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Toby Melville

February 26, 2019

By William James

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May will on Wednesday update parliament on her progress toward securing a Brexit deal, giving lawmakers the chance to challenge her approach and vote on alternatives.

May wants to negotiate changes to the departure deal she agreed with the EU last year and has promised to bring it back for approval in parliament by March 12 at the latest.

She looks to have postponed a moment of reckoning in the deeply divided legislature by promising lawmakers they will be given the chance next month to block a no-deal Brexit and delay Britain’s exit day if her agreement is rejected.

Wednesday’s debate will not involve a vote on whether to approve or reject a Brexit deal.

WHAT WILL THEY DEBATE?

Lawmakers will debate a simple government statement which reads: “This House notes the Prime Minister’s statement on EU exit of 26 February, 2019; and further notes that discussions between the UK and the EU are ongoing.”

CAN LAWMAKERS PROPOSE CHANGES TO THE WORDING?

Yes. They are known as amendments and, if approved by a vote, could exert political pressure on May to change the course of Brexit. However, the government is not legally bound to follow any changes approved following the debate.

Parliament Speaker John Bercow chooses which amendments are selected for debate.

WHAT CAN WE EXPECT?

May’s move to de-escalate a showdown in parliament over fears that her strategy could result in Britain leaving the EU without a deal means that a plan for parliament to seize back control of the process is not expected to be voted upon.

However, voting on other alternatives will still take place and a number of amendments could be put to a vote. The final wording of amendments has not been published yet.

WILL THERE BE VOTES?

Speaker Bercow will decide whether to select any of the amendments for a vote at the start of the debate, due around 1300 GMT.

Lawmakers will vote on each of the selected amendments one by one, before voting to give final approval to the wording of the motion itself. Voting is due to begin at 1900 GMT. Each vote takes around 15 minutes and the result is read out in parliament.

WHAT AMENDMENTS ARE EXPECTED?

1. A cross-party group of lawmakers, led by the Labour Party’s Yvette Cooper, will propose a plan that would give parliament the legal power to force May to seek an extension to the negotiating period.

However, it is expected to be withdrawn before a vote provided ministers confirm the timetable May set out on Tuesday.

2. The opposition Labour Party will put down an amendment setting out their own vision for Brexit and demanding the government adopt its negotiating position. Among other things, Labour is calling for a permanent UK-EU customs union.

3. A Conservative lawmaker will put forward a plan seeking to ensure that safeguards on the rights of EU citizens, which have already been agreed with Brussels as part of the withdrawal deal, would apply even if the government was not able to ratify the exit deal.

4. The Scottish National Party are also expected to table an amendment. They have previously called for the government to delay Britain’s EU exit date.

(Reporting by William James; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and John Stonestreet)

Source: OANN

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House Judiciary Committee issues subpoena for ‘complete and unredacted’ Mueller report

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., submitted a subpoena to obtain the "complete and unredacted" Mueller report Friday, a day after the redacted version became available to the public.

"This includes, but is not limited to, all summaries, exhibits, indices, tables of contents or other tables or figures, appendices, supplements, addenda or any other attachments whether written or attached in a separate electronic format," the subpoena read.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Off-duty journalist shot dead during Northern Ireland riot

Rioters clash with emergency vehicles in Londonderry, Northern Ireland
Rioters clash with emergency vehicles in Londonderry, Northern Ireland April 18, 2019, in this still image taken from a video from social media. Leona O'Neill via REUTERS

April 19, 2019

By Amanda Ferguson

BELFAST (Reuters) – An off-duty journalist was killed after shots were fired during rioting in the Northern Irish city of Londonderry overnight, in what police on Friday said was likely the work of militant nationalists opposed to the British region’s 1998 peace deal.

Rioting erupted in the Irish nationalist Creggan area of the city late on Thursday following a raid by police, who said they were trying to prevent militant attacks planned for the weekend. At least 50 petrol bombs were thrown and two cars set on fire.

“Unfortunately at 11 o’clock last night a gunman appeared and fired a number of shots toward the police and a young woman, Lyra McKee, 29 years old, was wounded” and later died, Police Service of Northern Ireland Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton told journalists on Friday.

He said police were treating the incident as a terrorist attack and had opened a murder inquiry.

“We believe this to be a terrorist act. We believe this has been carried out by violent dissident republicans,” Hamilton added, saying the New IRA group, which has been responsible for several attacks in recent years, was most likely behind the killing.

McKee was writing a book on the disappearance of young people during three decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which ended with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement peace deal. She was described by publisher Faber as a rising star of investigative journalism.

Police said they did not believe she was working at the time of the attack.

A local journalist at the scene, Leona O’Neill, wrote on Twitter that after the woman was hit and fell beside a police Land Rover, officers rushed her to hospital, where she died.

Videos posted on social media showed police vehicles being pelted with what she said were dozens of petrol bombs, bricks, bottles and fireworks.

The detonation of a large car bomb outside a courthouse in Londonderry in January highlighted the threat still posed by militant groups opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, who have previously launched attacks during the Easter period.

Politicians in Northern Ireland have also warned that Britain’s plans to leave the European Union could undermine the peace deal and that any border infrastructure would become targets for militant groups.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a congressional delegation to the city earlier on Thursday, as part of a trip to show support for the peace agreement politicians in Washington helped to broker.

The leaders of Northern Ireland’s two largest political parties, the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party and pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), both condemned the killing.

“Those who brought guns onto our streets in the 70s, 80s & 90s were wrong. It is equally wrong in 2019. No one wants to go back,” the DUP’s Arlene Foster said on Twitter.

Britain’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Karen Bradley said she was “deeply shocked and saddened” by McKee’s death.

(Additional reporting by Conor Humphries and Padraic Halpin in Dublin; Editing by Peter Cooney and Kirsten Donovan)

Source: OANN

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Power outage hits N Carolina Army base Fort Bragg

Fort Bragg Army base in North Carolina is suffering a widespread power outage.

News outlets report the base first mentioned the blackout late Wednesday and said no one knew when the power would return. A statement released early Thursday said the base is still open though many facilities are closed.

The outage also affected restaurants and commissaries on the base, which hosts about 52,000 soldiers.

The on-base Womack Army Medical Center says it's operating under reduced capacity and certain appointments at all on-base clinics will need to be rescheduled.

The base says visitors should call 911 to report suspicious activity and service members should contact their chain of command to learn when to report for duty.

Source: Fox News National

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Belarus to move forward with construction of apartments at site of Nazi-era mass grave

Officials at a southwestern city in Belarus are forging ahead with plans to build a luxury apartment building complex despite finding a Nazi-era mass grave containing nearly 2,000 remains at the construction site.

The mass grave was discovered by construction workers in the city of Brest more than two months ago and since then, specially trained soldiers have unearthed the remains of hundreds of Jews, killed when the city was occupied by Nazi Germany.

It’s the site of the old Jewish ghetto in the city.

The bodies are tangled with the remains of shreds of cloth and the soles of shoes.

“You see the results of this horrible war and of a genocide,” the commander of the search battalion, Major Pavel Galetsky, told DW. “History speaks for itself here.”

Soldiers from a special "search battalion" of Belarus Defence Ministry collect the remains of about 730 prisoners of a former Jewish ghetto, discovered in a mass grave at a construction site in the center of Brest, Belarus February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko - RC1F95AFA340

Soldiers from a special "search battalion" of Belarus Defence Ministry collect the remains of about 730 prisoners of a former Jewish ghetto, discovered in a mass grave at a construction site in the center of Brest, Belarus February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko - RC1F95AFA340

One of the remains found was that of a female holding the skeleton of a baby, as if she’s been cradling it, the BBC reported.

Before World War II, almost half of the more than 50,000 population of Brest were Jews. Up to 5,000 men were executed shortly after the Nazis invaded in June 1941.

The rest was crammed into a ghetto only several blocks large surrounded by barbed wire.

HUNDREDS OF CHILLING ITEMS DISCOVERED AT NAZI MASSACRE SITES

In October 1942, an order from Nazi Germany came to wipe them out, the BBC reported.

Thousands were herded on to freight trains and were driven more than 60 miles to a forest and shot at the edge of a vast pit.

The city register kept by the Germans showed that on Oct. 15, 1942, there were 17,893 Jews in Brest, according to the BBC. The next day, that figure was scratched out.

"That's how we know when the ghetto was liquidated," community leader Efim Basin.

Only a handful of Jews in Brest survived the mass executions, DW reported.

A soldier from a special "search battalion" of Belarus Defence Ministry takes part in the exhumation of a mass grave containing the remains of about 730 prisoners of a former Jewish ghetto, discovered at a construction site in the center of Brest, Belarus February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko - RC1569C86700

A soldier from a special "search battalion" of Belarus Defence Ministry takes part in the exhumation of a mass grave containing the remains of about 730 prisoners of a former Jewish ghetto, discovered at a construction site in the center of Brest, Belarus February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko - RC1569C86700

Near the site of the old ghetto, a small marble stone is dedicated to the 34,000 Jews killed in around Brest during World War II.

For several weeks after the remains were discovered, it was unclear what would happen with the construction of the building complex, according to DW.

It seems that the planned apartment complex – a lucrative project for the city – will continue as planned.

Some, including the city’s head of the cultural department, believe that the city does not need another memorial, but it does need better apartments.

"There should be a place where people can live well, a nice corner of the city of Brest," Alla Kondak said.

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City authorities and the construction have said that the actual foundation of the building would not touch the spot where the remains were found. Instead, the mass grave would be underneath a landscaped courtyard.

Kondak also pointed out that many of the buildings in the city are built on graves.

“When the buildings around here were built they also found bones,” Kondak said.

Source: Fox News World

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United says using larger jets on 737 MAX routes is ‘costing money’

FILE PHOTO: United Airlines planes, including a Boeing 737 MAX 9 model, are pictured at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston
FILE PHOTO: United Airlines planes, including a Boeing 737 MAX 9 model, are pictured at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas, U.S., March 18, 2019. REUTERS/Loren Elliott/File Photo

April 9, 2019

CHICAGO (Reuters) – United Airlines’ use of larger aircraft on routes previously flown by Boeing Co’s grounded 737 MAX jets is costing the carrier money in the short-term, President Scott Kirby said in a letter to employees seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

“Of course, we can’t keep this up forever,” Kirby said, while noting that eligible employees will receive a one-time $100 bonus on April 17 despite an “unusually high number of headwinds thrown our way in the first quarter.”

(Reporting by Tracy Rucinski; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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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