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Trey Gowdy calls Nadler subpoena vote part of a ‘communications war’

Former congressman Trey Gowdy appeared on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” on Wednesday and said he’d be “surprised” if Attorney General William Barr produces everything involved in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe. And he challenged House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., to begin investigating “malfeasance by the president.”

“I think he's right in this limited regard, it is Congress' responsibility to investigate malfeasance by the president,” Gowdy said.

REP. MEADOWS: NADLER'S REPORT SUBPOENA ABOUT HURTING TRUMP IN 2020

“Go right ahead. Mueller interviewed 500 witnesses, right? Go ahead and start. But the executive branch does not have to produce its work product so Congress can then use it against the executive branch. This subpoena deadline, I'll be surprised if Barr ever produces everything and they can go to court but they will lose in court.”

The House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for Mueller’s full report after the Justice Department missed a Democrat-imposed deadline Tuesday. So far, Barr has produced only a four-page summary.

Gowdy accused Nadler of voting to authorize subpoenas and pressuring Barr to release a full, unredacted report as part of a “communications war.”

“What you saw today is for public consumption. … It’s a communications war. It's not a constitutional war. That's clear. The executive branch does not have to comply with arbitrary deadlines set by a coequal branch,” Gowdy told MacCallum.

Gowdy also commented on a New York Times report that alleges some Mueller investigators believe their findings were more troubling for the president than Barr let on.

“You have 40 agents and almost 20 lawyers. I'd be shocked if they all were of unanimous opinion,” Gowdy said.

HOUSE DEMS PREPARE FOR SUBPOENA BATTLE OVER MUELLER REPORT

Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Russian Interference, the Steve Bartman of US Politics

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On Tuesday, presidential son-in-law and White House aide Jared Kushner had left-leaning social media abuzz by downplaying the real-world fallout of Russia’s efforts in the 2016 elections.  He characterized Kremlin-directed meddling as a “terrible thing” but also explained that “the investigations and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads.”   

When I ratified Kushner’s assessment on CNN’s broadcast with my colleague, host Chris Cuomo, I was met with guffaws and disbelief.  But here is the reality: Russia’s intrusion was very unwelcome and decidedly illegal, but the wildly disproportionate reaction by anti-Trump operatives in both government and media has far eclipsed the damage wrought by a minor 2016 foreign intelligence scheme.   

This totally unbalanced reaction represents the political equivalent to the Steve Bartman incident in Major League Baseball.  In 2003, the Chicago Cubs led the National League Championship Series three games to two and had a 3-0 lead in game six at home, with one out in the eighth inning.  A pop fly sailed foul but well within the left fielder’s reach. Lifelong Cubs fan Steve Bartman grabbed at the ball, as would many fans, interfering with Moises Alou’s attempted catch.  Both players and fans massively overreacted, forcing Bartman to exit Wrigley Field with a security detail, but the kerfuffle would have been utterly forgotten had previously dependable Cubs shortstop Alex Gonzalez ended the inning moments later with a potential double play ground ball hit right to him.  Instead, his rare error commenced an epic Cubs implosion that sent Chicago to defeat that night and in the ensuing NLCS game seven, vaulting the Marlins to the World Series. 

As in politics, the point here is that the scapegoat, the Bartman, is not really to blame.  Russians spending a whopping $100,000 on Facebook ads, per the Mueller Report, represents a miniscule rounding error compared to $81 million spent by the campaigns on Facebook within a presidential election where total direct and indirect spending reached into the billions of dollars.   

In fact, the “resistance” narrative of a stolen election insults the key voters who turned the 2016 tide Donald Trump’s way in the unlikely GOP sweep of key states Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Those voters, many of whom had either not voted before or had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, did not rally to Trump because they were somehow duped by an inconsequential international interference operation.  In reality, these voters were motivated by two things: They embraced the fighting, spirited agenda of a renegade Trump candidacy and they simultaneously rejected the arrogant, presuppositional pseudo-coronation of Hillary Clinton.

But rather than engage in even a scintilla of self-introspection regarding their wholesale misread of the American electorate, the mainstream media instead constructed a Potemkin Village narrative through the grand excuse that Russian interference caused this unacceptable electoral injustice.  Instead of considering Hillary’s Alex Gonzalez-like error of completely ignoring Wisconsin, they deemed it much better to cast aspersions on Russia’s role, the convenient new Bartman-esque bogeyman. 

As a citizen, I lament the damage such scapegoating inflicts upon our polity, but admittedly the partisan in me fully embraces the cognitive dissonance at play here.  For example, during the Easter Monday Democratic townhalls on my news channel, CNN, viewers watched an almost comical cavalcade of grievance apologetics, culminating in a call for voting rights for the incarcerated concurrent with the evisceration of constitutionally enumerated gun rights for the law-abiders. Clearly, instead of learning any lessons from 2016, the Democrats and their willing media allies would rather blame an allegedly all-powerful external intervention.  Instead of considering the myriad ways they themselves failed America, it’s much easier to just blame Russia, the new political Bartman.

Steve Cortes is a contributor to RealClearPolitics and a CNN  political commentator. His Twitter handle is @CortesSteve.

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Without papers, Uighurs fear for their future in Turkey

The Wider Image: Without papers, Uighurs fear for their future in Turkey
A masked Uighur boy takes part in a protest against China, at the courtyard of Fatih Mosque, a common meeting place for pro-Islamist demonstrators in Istanbul, Turkey, November 6, 2018. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

March 27, 2019

By Murad Sezer

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Without work or residency permits in Turkey and unable to renew their Chinese passports, Qurbanjan Nourmuhammed and his family live in uncertainty in Istanbul, cut off from their son who returned to Xinjiang three years ago.

Nourmuhammed, his wife and five children came to Turkey in 2015, facing increased pressure from China to abandon Islamic practices such as wearing a headscarf, growing a beard and closing their restaurant for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

China has faced growing international criticism for setting up facilities that United Nations experts describe as detention centers holding more than one million Uighurs and other Muslims. Beijing says it needs the measures to stem the threat of Islamist militancy, and calls them vocational training centers.

Ismail Cengiz, founding secretary general of the Istanbul-based East Turkestan National Center, said that some 35,000 Uighurs live in Turkey, which has been a safe haven for them since the 1960s.

Turkey is the only Muslim country that has regularly expressed concern about the situation in Xinjiang, due to its close cultural links with the Uighurs who speak a Turkic language.

While Uighurs had no problems in Turkey until three or four years ago, Ankara’s security concerns and stronger ties with Beijing reversed that trend, said Seyit Tumturk, president of a rights organization called the National Assembly of East Turkestan, the name that Uighur exiles use for Xinjiang.

Perceptions of Uighurs suffered after some went to fight with jihadists against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, because of the Syrian government’s close ties with Beijing, Tumturk said, adding China has ramped up pressure since then.

Nourmuhammed has not heard from his son Pakzat since he went back to Xinjiang in 2016 to visit his grandparents. A friend of Pakzat’s told Nourmuhammed that Pakzat was detained upon arrival at the airport in Urumchi. He believes the government accuses him of having links with extreme Islamists.

The Xinjiang government did not respond to a request for comment.

The family regularly attends protests around Turkey in the hopes of having their voices heard.

“When my son was arrested, he was only a 16-year-old kid. His younger siblings ask us constantly when they’ll be united with their older brother,” Pakzat’s mother Gulgine Mahmut said.

“I don’t believe he was involved in a crime, I think he was falsely accused.”

Nourmuhammed is unemployed as he waits for a residency permit he applied for in 2017 to be approved. Gulgine and their four children have been issued with permits, which risks tearing the family apart if Nourmuhammed is deported.

Nourmuhammed said his family lost touch with relatives in Xinjiang, who asked not to be contacted due to fears that the government will associate them with jihadists.

Uighurs also cannot renew their Chinese passports at the local embassy when they expire and they are only given a document that will allow them to return to China, said Munevver Ozuygur, President of the East Turkestan Nuzugum Culture and Family Foundation.

Some 15 Uighurs who spoke to Reuters said they expect Turkey to pay more attention to their plight and give them the permits to allow them to work and benefit from the healthcare system.

After a gunman, believed to be an Uzbek national, killed 39 people in a popular Istanbul nightclub on New Year’s Day 2017, Turkey took a more careful approach to people from central Asia, tightening the vetting process for new arrivals, Tumturk said.

“Not all of the people whose passports have been labeled as risky… are problematic people,” he said. “People who can’t retrieve a required document from China can experience the same issue.”

Cengiz said many Uighurs had begun to fear they may be sent back to China. “Turkey was seen as the only country that could stand up to China. In the past year, they have been fearing for their existence in Turkey,” he said.

However, some hope has returned after Turkey took a harder stance against China at a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting last month, where Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu criticized Beijing for the alleged mistreatment of Uighurs and called for authorities to protect the freedom of religion.

“There is a positive development in the favor of East Turkestan,” Ozuygur said. “Turkey started to give China the message that it is aware of the oppressions that Uighurs experience in a proper way with a diplomatic attitude.”

Click on https://reut.rs/2CFGEuf for a related photo essay.

(Writing by Ali Kucukgocmen; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

Source: OANN

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The Latest: Nigeria calls off search at collapsed school

The Latest on Nigeria school building collapse (all times local):

1:35 p.m.

A Nigerian official says search efforts have been halted a day after a school building collapsed in Lagos with an unknown number of children inside.

National Emergency Management Agency official Ibrahim Farinloye tells The Associated Press that workers have reached the foundation of the collapsed three-story building and don't expect to see any further bodies.

He declines to give an updated toll of dead and rescued. Officials late Wednesday said eight had died and 37 had been rescued.

___

9:55 a.m.

Search and rescue work continues in Nigeria a day after a building containing a school collapsed with scores of children said to be inside.

A National Emergency Management Agency spokesman late Wednesday said 37 people had been pulled out alive, with eight bodies recovered from the ruins.

An unknown number remain missing.

It is not yet known what caused the collapse of the three-story building in a densely crowded neighborhood at the heart of Nigeria' commercial capital, Lagos.

Building collapses are all too common in the West African nation, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight.

Lagos state Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode has said the building, which had been marked for demolition, was classified as residential and the school was operating illegally on the top two floors.

Source: Fox News World

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Motor racing: Raikkonen pushes Ferrari off the top of test timesheets

F1 - Pre Season Testing
Formula One F1 - Pre Season Testing - Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain - February 20, 2019 Alfa Romeo's Kimi Raikkonen in action during testing REUTERS/Albert Gea

February 20, 2019

By Alan Baldwin

BARCELONA (Reuters) – Alfa Romeo driver Kimi Raikkonen produced the fastest lap so far in Formula One’s pre-season testing to push his previous team, Ferrari, off the top of the lunchtime leaderboard on Wednesday.

It was the first time since testing started on Monday at the Circuit de Catalunya that Ferrari had not led at the end of a session.

The Finn, returning to the Swiss-based team previously known as Sauber, lapped with a best time of one minute 17.762 seconds on the softest, and fastest, C5 tyre compound.

Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, his team mate last season, was second fastest in 1:18.350.

Raikkonen’s lap was also the first time a team had gone faster in 2019 than they managed in last year’s pre-season testing.

Champions Mercedes continued to keep their powder dry, with Finland’s Valtteri Bottas the slowest of the nine cars on track but doing more laps than anyone else — 88 to Vettel’s 80, both on the same medium C3 tyre.

Renault’s Nico Hulkenberg was third fastest in 1:18.800.

McLaren, whose performance has been encouraging over the first two days, missed the first two hours after what they described as “some overnight changes” to the car but managed to get Spaniard Carlos Sainz out for 27 laps before lunch.

Williams continued to be absent from the track but were expected to appear in the afternoon after their much-delayed car reached the track in the early hours after problems finishing building it on time.

British rookie George Russell was scheduled to drive the opening laps for the former champions who finished bottom of the constructors’ table in 2018.

(Reporting by Alan Baldwin; Editing by David Goodman)

Source: OANN

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Exclusive: Arrival of Putin’s judo partner squeezed Shell out of LNG project – sources

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Gazprom marketing department is seen in front of the office located on the Champs Elysees in Paris
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Gazprom marketing department is seen in front of the office located on the Champs Elysees in Paris ,January 5, 2009. REUTERS/Charles Platiau

April 11, 2019

By Dmitry Zhdannikov and Olesya Astakhova

LONDON/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell pulled out of a project to build a Russian liquefied natural gas plant partly because Gazprom suddenly added another partner with links to an ally of President Vladimir Putin, according to five sources.

After three years work on the Baltic Coast project, Shell discovered that Gazprom was bringing in a company linked to Arkady Rotenberg, who is on a U.S. sanctions blacklist.

The sudden change in the line-up of partners was one of the key factors contributing to Shell’s Wednesday announcement that it was pulling out of the project, according to three sources close to Shell and two other sources familiar with the project.

Asked to comment on the reasons for withdrawing, a Shell spokesman said it had nothing to add to a previous statement that said its exit followed Gazprom’s announcement last month of its final concept for the project. Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said the company was not commenting.

According to the two sources close to Shell, Gazprom did not consult with Shell about bringing in the firm, which is called RusGazDobycha, but instead presented it with the plan as a fait accompli.

With RusGazDobycha’s arrival also came changes to the configuration of the project itself, which Shell did not feel comfortable with, all of the sources said.

It became untenable for Shell to stay in the project “and that was clear from the moment that Gazprom announced it was going to build the plant together with RusGazDobycha,” said one of the sources familiar with the project.

A RusGazDobycha official did not respond to a request for comment. Asked if the presidential administration had any role in RusGazDobycha’s entry into the project, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was a question for the companies involved.

The sudden shift in the project underlines the unpredictability of doing business in Russia — even for a firm like Shell with a long pedigree of successful cooperation. It also shows how Rotenberg’s business empire, focused mainly on construction and engineering, is expanding into the energy sector.

Shell said that its other joint projects in Russia — chief among them the Gazprom-led Sakhalin-2 LNG plant — would be unaffected by its exit from the Baltic LNG project.

But Shell’s involvement in Sakhalin expires this month. Unless the Russian government decides to extend the Sakhalin deal, Shell’s portfolio of Russian projects will be left looking thin.

The Russian government has given no indication as to whether it would extend Shell’s Sakhalin contract.

“DIGGING YOUR OWN GRAVE”

One of the problems for Shell was that Rotenberg, a long-standing friend of Putin and his former judo training partner, was under sanctions and that created sanctions risks for Shell too, according to one of the sources close to Shell and the second source familiar with the project.

For Shell, partnering with a Rotenberg-linked firm was tantamount to “digging yourself your own sanctions grave,” said that source.

But the other sources said the primary issue for Shell was the change in the configuration of the LNG project.

RusGazDobycha is 100 percent-owned by a firm called National Gas Group (NGG), according to the Spark database, which collates official data from the tax agency and the state statistics agency.

Until November 2016, Rotenberg had a 51 percent stake in NGG, the database shows. The majority owner of NGG now is Artyom Obolensky, who is also chairman of the board of SMP Bank, controlled by Arkady Rotenberg and his brother Boris.

A representative of Arkady Rotenberg, asked about the Baltic LNG project, said Rotenberg “has no interests in this business.”

The brothers were both added to the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions blacklist in March 2014.

The sanctions designation stated that the brothers had amassed enormous amounts of wealth during the years of Putin’s rule, and that they had received high-price contracts to carry out work for Gazprom and the 2014 Winter Olympic games in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.

(Additional reporting by Maria Grabar, Vladimir Soldatkin Gleb Stolyarov and Polina Nikolskaya; Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Anna Willard)

Source: OANN

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German Nazi camp guard, 92, charged as accessory to thousands of murders

FILE PHOTO: A watch tower is pictured at the former Austrian Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen
FILE PHOTO: A watch tower is pictured at the former Austrian Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen May 7, 2010. REUTERS/Herwig Prammer/File Photo

April 18, 2019

BERLIN (Reuters) – German prosecutors have charged a 92-year-old former concentration camp guard with being an accessory to murder, in what will be one of the last ever cases against Nazi-era war crimes.

Hamburg prosecutors accused the man, identified only as Bruno D., of aiding and abetting 5,230 cases of murder during the almost nine months he spent on duty at a concentration camp watch-tower at the end of World War Two.

According to Die Welt newspaper, which first reported the charges, the man admitted to prosecutors during a voluntary interrogation last year that he had seen people being taken to gas chambers to be murdered.

“What good would it have done for me to leave? They’d just have found somebody else,” he told prosecutors, according to the newspaper.

“I felt bad for the people there. I didn’t know why they were there. I knew that they were Jews who had committed no crime.”

D., who was 17 when he began serving at Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk in present-day Poland, said he had only joined the SS, the paramilitary wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, because a heart weakness meant he was only suited for “garrison service”.

He said he had not been a Nazi sympathizer.

With only a handful of people involved in Nazi Germany’s genocidal crimes still alive, all in extreme old age, prosecutors are racing against time to ensure at least some justice is done by the victims, including the five million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

The case against another nonagenarian former guard at Stutthof, where more than 60,000 people died, was halted last year because the suspect was too infirm to stand trial.

Another, Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz” for his job counting cash stolen from people sent to the most notorious of all the regime’s death camps, died last year aged 96 as he waited to begin his sentence.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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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