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Large blast outside crowded restaurant in Somalia's capital

A Somali police officer says an explosives-laden vehicle has detonated outside a restaurant in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu.

Capt. Mohamed Hussein says the blast occurred as the restaurant in Waberi district was crowded with diners.

There is no immediate word of casualties.

The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group often targets high-profile areas in Mogadishu with suicide bombings.

Source: Fox News World

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BMW’s UK Mini plant shuts for four weeks despite Brexit delay

FILE PHOTO: A Mini badge is seen at the car making plant in Oxford
FILE PHOTO: A Mini badge is seen at the car making plant in Oxford, western England July 9, 2012. REUTERS/Eddie Keogh/File Photo

April 1, 2019

By Costas Pitas

LONDON (Reuters) – BMW’s Mini plant in Britain closes for four weeks from Monday in a move planned over a half year ago to help the company deal with any disruption resulting from Brexit, which has since been delayed.

The German carmaker, which builds just over 15 percent of Britain’s 1.5 million cars, moved its annual summertime shutdown to April to “minimise the risk of any possible short-term parts-supply disruption in the event of a no-deal Brexit.”

But Britain’s departure from the EU has now been pushed back from March 29 until at least April 12 or potentially much later, scuppering the timing of major contingency plans for some carmakers.

Shutdowns are organized far in advance so employee holidays can be scheduled and suppliers can adjust volumes, making them hard to move.

“This is what our company and our workforce have planned for over many months and it is fixed into our business planning,” said a BMW spokesman.

It represents the latest headache for Britain’s once roaring car sector which had been on track for record production but since 2017 has posted sharp falls in sales, output and investment.

The overwhelmingly foreign-owned industry has become increasingly incredulous as a stable and attractive investment environment descends into one of its deepest political crises, risking the free and frictionless trade the sector relies on.

BMW’s Rolls-Royce factory in Goodwood will close for two weeks whilst Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) three car plants and engine facility and Honda’s Swindon facility will also shut for a few days this month as part of Brexit contingencies.

It has been a turbulent few months for the sector after Nissan canceled plans to build a new sport utility vehicle at its English Sunderland plant and Honda said it would shutter its plant in 2021 in the biggest blow to the sector for years.

Toyota provided a rare boost when it announced plans to build cars for Suzuki at its English car plant.

BMW, which is also closing its central English Hams Hall engine facility and Swindon press shop and sub-assembly site for four weeks, has said it could move some engine and Mini output out of Britain if there is not an orderly Brexit.

Carmakers face a number of risks if there is a disorderly Brexit, including delays to the supply of ports and finished models, new customs bureaucracy, the need to recertify models and an up to 10 percent tariff on finished vehicles.

A series of investment decisions are coming up, including whether Peugeot’s parent company PSA will keep its Ellesmere Port plant open and if it will build electric vans at its southern English Luton facility.

Petrochemicals firm Ineos is also due to choose the location for its off-roader whilst a decision is pending on whether JLR will build electric vehicles in its home market.

(Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)

Source: OANN

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Frenchman picked to head UN-backed climate fund

Frenchman Yannick Glemarec has been picked to head a U.N.-backed body that helps developing countries fund efforts to tackle climate change.

The Green Climate Fund said Monday that its board selected Glemarec at a meeting in South Korea, where it is based.

The fund has received billions of dollars (euros) to help poor countries' reduce their emissions and prepare for the impact of climate change.

But the fund's work has been fraught with difficulty and its previous director, Australian Howard Bamsey, resigned in July.

Glemarec, who has a background in environmental science, was previously U.N. assistant secretary-general and held a senior position at the agency U.N. Women from 2015 to 2018.

Source: Fox News World

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Students who protested Border Patrol visit should have charges dropped, professors say

More than 70 University of Arizona professors are calling on university police to drop charges against two students who disrupted a campus speaking event last month featuring agents from the federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency.

The professors, part of a group called Professors of Color, urged university President Robert Robbins to focus on student and faculty safety instead, according to a letter dated Wednesday.

"We ask that you, in your role as President, end the investigations and harassment of the students by demanding that UAPD Chief, Brian Seastone, drop the charges against them," the letter read. "We also implore you to ask the Dean of Students to support rather than investigate the two students."

10 STUNNING DISPUTES OVER FREE SPEECH BETWEEN STUDENTS, FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATORS

They wrote that Mexican-American studies faculty have received death threats since video of the protest on the Tucson campus went viral, the Arizona Republic reported.

"Rather than its current emphasis on investigating and criminalizing free speech, the UAPD and administration's highest priority should be an immediate UA response to the death threats and the impact that the Border Patrol on campus has on many of our students, staff, and employees," they wrote.

Students were protesting a March 19 visit by Border Patrol agents to a meeting of the Criminal Justice Association, a student club, according to the paper. Videos of the protest showed the agents speaking to students, with some calling the agents “Murder Patrol” and “an extension of the KKK.”

Some followed the agents to their car, chanting “Murder Patrol” until they left.

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Robbins called the protest a "dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus" in a March 29 letter posted online. He announced that two students – who have not been publicly identified – would be charged with misdemeanors for their actions.

A university spokesperson told the paper that Mexican-American studies faculty alerted the school about a threat. University police and other law enforcement agencies "evaluated the message and the source of the message and determined there was not a threat to campus or to public safety, the spokesperson said.

Source: Fox News National

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The Latest: Poland pulls out of Israel meeting over comments

The Latest on the dispute between Poland and Israel (all times local):

11:35 a.m.

Poland's prime minister says his country is not sending a delegation to a meeting in Jerusalem after the acting Israeli foreign minister said that Poles "collaborated with the Nazis" and "sucked anti-Semitism from their mothers' milk."

The developments mark a new low in a bitter conflict over how to remember and characterize Polish actions toward Jews during the German occupation of Poland in World War II.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the remarks by acting foreign minister Israel Katz "unacceptable" and "racist."

Morawiecki had already announced Sunday that he was pulling out of the meeting in Israel on Monday and Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and leaders of four central European nations. That had followed a comment by Netanyahu last week about Polish cooperation with the Nazis.

___

10:05 a.m.

A government official says Poland is considering pulling out altogether from a visit to Israel over a comment made by the acting Israeli foreign minister, the latest in a bitter new Holocaust spat between the two nations.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki already pulled out of the meeting Monday and Tuesday to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by leaders from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz was tapped to go in his place.

On Monday, Michal Dworczyk, the head Morawiecki's office, said Czaputowicz's attendance is now in doubt over comments made by Israel Katz, the acting foreign minister.

Katz said Sunday that Poles "sucked anti-Semitism from their mothers' milk," citing something once said by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, whose father was murdered by Poles.

Source: Fox News World

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NASA Mulls Making Water on Moon Using “Chemical Factory”

When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the Moon’s surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the Moon’s surface in ingredients that could make water, NASA scientists have found.

Using a computer program, scientists simulated the chemistry that unfolds when the solar wind pelts the Moon’s surface. As the Sun streams protons to the Moon, they found, those particles interact with electrons in the lunar surface, making hydrogen (H) atoms. These atoms then migrate through the surface and latch onto the abundant oxygen (O) atoms bound in the silica (SiO2) and other oxygen-bearing molecules that make up the lunar soil, or regolith. Together, hydrogen and oxygen make the molecule hydroxyl (OH), a component of water, or H2O.

“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who helped develop the simulation. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”

Understanding how much water — or its chemical components — is available on the Moon is critical to NASA’s goal of sending humans to establish a permanent presence there, said Orenthal James Tucker, a physicist at Goddard who spearheaded the simulation research.

“We’re trying to learn about the dynamics of transport of valuable resources like hydrogen around the lunar surface and throughout its exosphere, or very thin atmosphere, so we can know where to go to harvest those resources,” said Tucker, who recently described the simulation results in the journal JGR Planets.

Alex Jones reveals the truth behind China’s exploration of the dark side of the moon, an adventure that, in all likelihood, has already been carried out by covert, American-run space programs.

Several spacecraft used infrared instruments that measure light emitted from the Moon to identify the chemistry of its surface. These include NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft, which had numerous close encounters with the Earth-Moon system en route to comet 103P/Hartley 2; NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which passed the Moon on its way to Saturn; and India’s Chandrayaan-1, which orbited the Moon a decade ago. All found evidence of water or its components (hydrogen or hydroxyl).

But how these atoms and compounds form on the Moon is still an open question. It’s possible that meteor impacts initiate the necessary chemical reactions, but many scientists believe that the solar wind is the primary driver.

Tucker’s simulation, which traces the lifecycle of hydrogen atoms on the Moon, supports the solar wind idea.

“From previous research, we know how much hydrogen is coming in from the solar wind, we also know how much is in the Moon’s very thin atmosphere, and we have measurements of hydroxyl in the surface,” Tucker said. “What we’ve done now is figure out how these three inventories of hydrogen are physically intertwined.”

(Photo by NASA)

Showing how hydrogen atoms behave on the Moon helped resolve why spacecraft have found fluctuations in the amount of hydrogen in different regions of the Moon. Less hydrogen accumulates in warmer regions, like the Moon’s equator, because hydrogen atoms deposited there get energized by the Sun and quickly outgas from the surface into the exosphere, the team concluded. Conversely, more hydrogen appears to accumulate in the colder surface near the poles because there’s less Sun radiation and the outgassing is slowed.

Overall, Tucker’s simulation shows that as solar wind continually blasts the Moon’s surface, it breaks the bonds among atoms of silicon, iron and oxygen that make up the majority of the Moon’s soil. This leaves oxygen atoms with unsatisfied bonds. As hydrogen atoms flow through the Moon’s surface, they get temporarily trapped with the unhinged oxygen (longer in cold regions than in warm). They float from O to O before finally diffusing into the Moon’s atmosphere, and, ultimately, into space. “The whole process is like a chemical factory,” Farrell said.

A key ramification of the result, Farrell said, is that every exposed body of silica in space — from the Moon down to a small dust grain — has the potential to create hydroxyl and thus become a chemical factory for water.

Alex Jones calls in from the road to join Owen Shroyer to confirm that Infowars is tomorrow’s news today!

Source: InfoWars

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Australia’s AMP scraps short-term bonuses to avert possible board spill

FILE PHOTO: The logo of AMP adorns the head office of Australia's biggest retail wealth manager in Sydney
FILE PHOTO: The logo of AMP adorns the head office of Australia's biggest retail wealth manager in Sydney, Australia, May 5, 2017. REUTERS/David Gray/File Photo

March 20, 2019

By Paulina Duran

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s AMP Ltd <AMP.AX> on Wednesday said it will not pay short-term bonuses to most executives, a move that could help it avoid possible board removal should investors vote against its remuneration practices for the second consecutive year.

The country’s largest listed wealth manager has been embroiled in accusations of deception at a government-mandated inquiry into misconduct in the financial sector. The business subsequently lost its chairman and chief executive officer and haemorrhaged billions of dollars in funds.

“The board understands that many of our shareholders are disappointed with AMP’s business and financial performance in 2018,” Chairman David Murray said in the wealth manager’s annual report published on Wednesday.

“Reflecting the circumstances of last year, the board decided to award zero short-term incentives for AMP’s group leadership team in 2018,” excluding unit AMP Capital, which was not directly connected to any accusations raised in the inquiry.

The deferred part of bonuses for a number of former executives will also be forfeit, Murray said.

AMP believed shareholders had voted against pay plans last year in response to “wider issues” in the business as well as concerns about its remuneration framework, which was now being re-designed, Murray said.

Under Australian corporate rules, if more than a quarter of shareholders vote against a pay proposal for two years running, they can call for the board to be removed.

The annual report also showed Francesco De Ferrari, who began his term as chief executive officer on Dec. 1, was paid A$1.2 million ($847,440) cash in 2018, reflecting a buy-out payment to leave previous employer Credit Suisse Group AG <CSGN.S>.

At the year-long Royal Commission inquiry last year, AMP revealed it charged fees without rendering services and had attempted to deceive regulators. The wealth manager denied any malicious intention and said the causes were administrative.

($1 = 1.4160 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Paulina Duran; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

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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