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UN Mideast envoy condemns Hamas crackdown on street protests

The U.N. Mideast envoy has condemned Gaza's Hamas rulers for violently cracking down on popular protests over the past few days.

Nickolay Mladenov said Sunday that he was especially alarmed by the "brutal beating" of journalists and human rights workers.

Tahseen Astal, a member of the Gaza Journalists' Syndicate, said Hamas forces had assaulted dozens of local Palestinian journalists and four were hospitalized for their injuries. He said that police raided journalists' homes following their posts on social media and that seven remained in custody.

Driven by Hamas tax hikes and the desperation of living under Israeli-Egyptian blockade, hundreds of Palestinians have rallied under the slogan "We want to live" to protest the rising cost of living in the enclave. Videos have circulated online showing Hamas officials forcibly dispersing demonstrations.

Source: Fox News World

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China’s Didi recruits Colombian drivers ahead of Bogota launch

Logo of Didi Chuxing is seen at its headquarters building in Beijing
FILE PHOTO: Logo of Didi Chuxing is seen at its headquarters building in Beijing, China August 28, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee

April 22, 2019

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing said on Monday it is beginning to recruit drivers ahead of its launch in Colombia’s capital Bogota in the coming months.

“We have arrived in Colombia with an attractive offer for those who want to register as drivers and we hope to be able to meet the market’s expectations,” the company said in a statement.

The statement did not specify when Didi’s services would begin in the Andean country.

Didi is planning to take on U.S. rival Uber Technologies Inc in some of Latin America’s fastest-growing markets and has moved senior executives from China to lead its expansion in such places as Chile and Peru.

The company is China’s dominant ride-hailing firm and is backed by investors including Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp.

In 2016, Didi bought Uber’s operations in China following a bruising two-year fight for local domination.

The two firms are already battling for market share in Brazil, where Didi bought local start-up 99 in January 2018, and Mexico, where the Chinese firm lured drivers with higher pay and bonuses for signing up other drivers and passengers.

Uber, is popular in Colombia but illegal and the government has said it will suspend for 25 years the licenses of drivers caught working for the platform.

Didi claims to have 31 million drivers across 15 different products – including services for taxis, buses, bicycles and deliveries – and that it completes more than 10 billion rides a year.

(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; writing by Julia Symmes Cobb, editing by G Crosse)

Source: OANN

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Beto O’Rourke to leap into 2020 Democratic presidential race

FILE PHOTO: O'Rourke speaks to Winfrey on stage during a taping of her TV show in Manhattan
FILE PHOTO: Beto O'Rourke speaks to Oprah Winfrey on stage during a taping of her TV show in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., February 5, 2019. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri/File Photo

March 14, 2019

By James Oliphant

(Reuters) – Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke will launch his 2020 presidential bid on Thursday, ending months of speculation about whether he would join the sprawling field of Democrats vying for the chance to run against President Donald Trump.

    O’Rourke, who gained a national following with his long-shot election battle against U.S. Senator Ted Cruz last year, will make his announcement via video on social media at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT), a source close to the campaign said.

He is expected to immediately set out on a campaign swing through Iowa, which holds the first Democratic nominating contest in February 2020.

Beyond a previously announced event in Waterloo, Iowa on Saturday, O’Rourke is expected to visit other towns in eastern Iowa, traditionally a Democratic stronghold, Politico said.

The trip will serve as the first test of whether O’Rourke can carry to the national political stage the pop-star appeal he showed in Texas last year, drawing enthusiastic crowds and $80 million in campaign donations.

O’ Rourke heads to Iowa amid some signs his popularity there has waned in the past several weeks, as he has publicly deliberated about a run while more than a dozen Democrats leapt into the race.

An influential Iowa poll released last week showed O’Rourke as the first choice of just 5 percent of Democratic voters, behind four contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who has not yet declared a bid, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.

When the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll was first run in December, O’Rourke placed third, the top choice of 11 percent. In an encouraging sign, however, a third of respondents said they did not know enough about him to have an opinion.

O’Rourke, 47, served three terms in Congress representing a region of West Texas along the U.S. border with Mexico.

His initial challenge in the Democratic presidential race will be to distinguish himself from candidates sharing his positions on key progressive issues, such as universal health care and refusing donations from corporate political action committees.

Of late, O’Rourke has tried to distance himself from some left-leaning candidates, such as Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, whom Trump has derided as “socialists”.

“I’m a capitalist,” O’Rourke told reporters last month. “I don’t see how we’re able to meet any of the fundamental challenges that we have as a country without, in part, harnessing the power of the market.”

O’Rourke, whose given name is Robert Francis, acquired his nickname while growing up in El Paso, Texas.

In 2012, he won against incumbent Democratic congressman Silvestre Reyes in a Latino-majority district, and was re-elected twice before giving up his seat to run against Cruz.

A former bassist in a punk band, O’Rourke’s 1998 arrest for driving while intoxicated has been an issue in every campaign he has run and will undoubtedly resurface during his presidential bid.

(Additional reporting by Julio-Cesar Chavez in El Paso, Texas; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Source: OANN

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EU party leader says problems not solved after Orban meeting

A leader of the main center-right group in the European Parliament says that a meeting with Hungary's prime minister has not resolved the issues that could lead to the expulsion of Hungary's Fidesz party from the bloc.

Manfred Weber, leader of the European People's Party, says that while a meeting Tuesday in Budapest with Prime Minister Viktor Orban had a "constructive atmosphere," the EPP will still discuss Fidesz's status in the group.

Weber welcomed the Hungarian government's decision to end an advertising campaign criticizing the European Union's migration policies, but reiterated his call for Orban to apologize for the campaign and "for the burden and for the problems he was creating" for the EPP.

Orban's office did not issue any statements about the meeting with Weber.

Source: Fox News World

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Anti-Brexit Britons hit Irish pub in Brussels to watch vote

A small group of British citizens who oppose Brexit were in an Irish pub in Belgium's capital when they watched a vote on their country's future.

The Britons drinking beer in Brussels had their eyes fixed intently on the James Joyce pub's TV as lawmakers in London said "yea" or "nay" to Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal.

The agreement's resounding defeat Tuesday night drew a smattering of applause in the bar, which is located down the road from the headquarters of the EU's executive European Commission.

At other times, the anti-Brexit crowd booed May and cried "Yes! Yes!" when the possibility of the U.K. abandoning its planned departure was mentioned.

The pub's co-owner, Jessica Fitch, summed up the mood before the vote, saying Brexit makes her "feel like something has been ripped away from me."

Source: Fox News World

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3 men shot dead at California home in upscale, gated community; homicide investigation launched

Authorities are investigating the deaths of three men who were shot and killed inside a California home located in a gated community Monday.

Los Angeles fire officials discovered the men’s bodies inside the Porter Ranch house after someone “associated with the people inside the house” called 911 and alerted police, Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Alan Hamilton said.

The shooting occurred just before 4 p.m. at the two-story home in Renaissance, an upscale gated community in the Porter Ranch neighborhood in Los Angeles County, FOX11 reported.

CALIFORNIA WOMAN CHARGED WITH ANIMAL CRUELTY AFTER ALLEGEDLY DRAGGING DOG WHILE RIDING SCOOTER

"At this time, it looks like someone entered the residence and there were some shots fired. There are multiple victims of gunshot wounds down inside of the residence and we do not have any suspect information that is available at this time," Hamilton said.

Police did not identify a possible suspect in the deadly shooting.

Police did not identify a possible suspect in the deadly shooting. (FOX11 LA)

The motive of the shooting is under investigation and no arrests have been made.

Video of the crime scene showed shattered glass near the back door. Hamilton said investigators were combing through a “large crime scene” and looking for clues to piece together the events leading up to the men’s deaths.

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California Rep. Brad Sherman, who lives in Porter Ranch, told reporters Monday that he was at dinner when the incident occurred.

"Things can happen anywhere and at the same time, I think it's a very safe neighborhood," he said.

Los Angeles police urged anyone who has information related to the incident to come forward.

Source: Fox News National

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Doc investigated over drug overdoses seeks board hearing

An intensive-care doctor accused of ordering painkiller overdoses for dozens of Ohio hospital patients has asked the state's medical board for a hearing before it decides whether to take further action against his suspended license.

Board spokeswoman Tessie Pollock says the hearing requested Friday by William Husel (HYOO'-suhl) hasn't been scheduled yet.

The Columbus-area Mount Carmel Health System fired Husel in December. It says he ordered potentially fatal doses for 29 patients and doses for six more patients that were excessive but not likely what caused their deaths.

Husel is under investigation. His lawyers aren't commenting on the allegations.

Husel and the hospital face at least 19 related wrongful death lawsuits .

Mount Carmel apologized , put 23 other employees on leave , and says it changed its medication protocols to prevent similar situations.

Source: Fox News National

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

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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