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The Latest: 6 potential jurors excused in ex-cop’s trial

The Latest on the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman in 2017 (all times local):

4:35 p.m.

Six potential jurors have been excused from hearing the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman who called 911 to report a possible assault.

Mohamed Noor is charged with murder in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond.

Attorneys and the judge said Tuesday that they've examined the questionnaires filled out by roughly half of the potential 75 jurors. They excused six of them based on their written answers.

One excused juror wrote that he or she has negative feelings toward Somalis and believed Noor was a fast-track police hire. Noor is Somali American.

Another potential juror said he had already decided that Noor is innocent.

___

12:30 a.m.

Attorneys will argue Tuesday whether jurors at a former Minneapolis police officer's murder trial should see a "fly through" exhibit of the shooting scene.

The prosecution wants to introduce a 3D scan of the neighborhood where Mohamed Noor fatally shot 40-year-old Justine Ruszczyk Damond in July 2017 after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault behind her home.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension used the scanner to document the scene. In a motion, the prosecution says one of the videos shows where Noor's squad car was in relation to Damond's body.

The BCA also inserted lines showing potential bullet trajectories. But Noor's attorneys contend the video is inadmissible because it "inaccurately and prejudicially depicts what a person would actually see."

Jury selection began Monday and resumes Wednesday.

Source: Fox News National

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Tennis: Bencic stuns Svitolina to set up Dubai final with Kvitova

WTA Premier 5 - Dubai Tennis Championships
Tennis - WTA Premier 5 - Dubai Tennis Championships - Dubai Duty Free Tennis Stadium, Dubai, United Arab Emirates - February 22, 2019 Switzerland's Belinda Bencic celebrates winning the Semi Final against Ukraine's Elina Svitolina REUTERS/Satish Kumar

February 22, 2019

(Reuters) – Switzerland’s Belinda Bencic stepped closer to ending a four-year title drought when she squeezed past defending champion Elina Svitolina 6-2 3-6 7-6(3) to reach the final of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships on Friday.

Bencic will face second seed Petra Kvitova on Saturday after the Czech came from a set down to beat unseeded Taiwanese Hsieh Su-wei 3-6 6-2 6-4 in the other semi-final.

Svitolina, who reached the last four without dropping a set, lost her serve early and made 10 unforced errors as she surrendered the first set without carving out a single break point against Bencic.

The 21-year-old Swiss, who triumphed in Eastbourne and Toronto in 2015 and reached a career-high seventh in the world in 2016 before injuries stalled her progress, won 85 percent of her first-serve points as she dominated the opening set, but Svitolina turned the tables in the second.

The Ukrainian, who won the last two editions of the Dubai tournament, did not give up without a fight, breaking Bencic early before running away with the second set to force a decider.

Both players stayed on serve in the third until Svitolina broke to take a 5-3 lead, but Bencic rallied strongly, winning eight points in a row to regain the upper hand.

Svitolina saved three match points to send the contest into a tiebreak and this time Bencic made no mistake, winning four of the last five points to book her spot in the final.

Australian Open runner-up Kvitova lost the opening set against Hsieh but made an astute tactical adjustment midway through the match that changed the course of the contest.

The Taiwanese, who knocked out Wimbledon champion Angelique Kerber and fourth seed Karolina Pliskova during her run to the semi-finals, kept Kvitova guessing with her unorthodox shot selection and soon had the world number four on the back foot.

“It was a tough one today, for sure,” Kvitova, the winner of two Wimbledon titles, said. “She really didn’t give me anything for free. It was a tough first set. I’m glad that I was able to came back in the second. I didn’t play great at the end of the first.”

Kvitova, the champion in Dubai in 2013, switched things up in the second set, stepping up well within the baseline to take time away from Hsieh and rushing to the net behind her own powerful serve.

The new approach paid dividends and Kvitova began reeling off winners at will as she raced into a 4-1 lead before claiming the set to force a decider.

The pair began the third set with an exchange of service breaks, but Kvitova broke again and then held her serve to get in front before wrapping up the win.

In the end, Hsieh had no answer to Kvitova’s raw power, mustering just 14 clean winners compared to 48 from her opponent.

(Reporting by Simon Jennings in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian Radnedge and Pritha Sarkar)

Source: OANN

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No one in Europe would oppose extension to Brexit talks: Juncker

EU Commission President Juncker delivers a speech at the opening of the EU Industry Days 2019 in Brussels
FILE PHOTO: European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker delivers a keynote speech at the opening of the EU Industry Days 2019 in Brussels, Belgium, February 5, 2019. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

February 18, 2019

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – No one in Europe would oppose a British demand for an extension of talks on Britain’s exit from the European Union beyond the March 29 deadline, the head of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker told the Stuttgarter Zeitung in an interview.

With only weeks left to the exit date, Britain’s parliament does not want to accept the withdrawal agreement that has been reached between Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU, and many EU officials see postponing the exit date as the only way to avoid Britain crashing out without any deal.

“Any decision to ask for more time lies with the UK. If such a request were to be made, no one in Europe would oppose it. If you are asking for how long the withdrawal can be postponed, I have no time frame in mind,” Juncker told the German newspaper.

Many EU officials note that elections to the European Parliament on May 23-26 and the first sitting of the new parliament at the start of July creates a natural time-limit for any extension, which should not go beyond end of June.

Juncker also indicated a longer extension could be problematic, but did not exclude it.

“With Brexit so many timetables have already gone by the wayside. But I find it hard to imagine that British voters would again vote in the European elections. That to my mind would be an irony of history. Yet I cannot rule it out,” he said.

“When it comes to Brexit, it is like being before the courts or on the high seas; we are in God’s hands. And we can never quite be sure when God will take the matter in hand.”

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: OANN

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Catalonia protesters burn tires, block highways over separatist trial

Police officers stand next to burning barricades settled to block the AP7 highway during a regional strike near Girona
Police officers stand next to burning barricades settled to block the AP7 highway during a regional strike near Girona, Spain, February 21, 2019. REUTERS/Pilar Suarez

February 21, 2019

GIRONA, Spain (Reuters) – Catalan activist groups burned tires and tried to block highways across northeast Spain on Thursday as part of a day of protests against the trial of 12 separatist political leaders for their part in a declaration of independence in 2017.

Eleven highways in Catalonia were affected by the protests, police reported, adding that they were working to keep traffic flowing. Police said there had been some scuffles with protesters but no major incidents were reported.

Members of local groups, working under the name Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDRs), have staged similar protests across the region ever since the arrests following the illegal declaration of secession in the Catalan parliament.

The 12 Catalan separatist leaders went on trial in Madrid last week over the failed independence bid that triggered Spain’s biggest political crisis in decades.

On Thursday, pro-independence Catalans plan to strike as part of protests which will include marches held by supporters of civil groups Omnium and the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) at midday and a bigger march in the evening.

The extent of the strike was not immediately clear while police said major roads had been reopened after initial obstructions to traffic had been removed.

Former ANC leader Jordi Sanchez and the ex-head of Omnium Jordi Cuixart are in the dock on Thursday as part of the trial which is expected to last for at least three months.

Defendants face charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds, which they all deny.

(Reporting by Pilar Suárez and Jordi Rubio; Writing by Paul Day; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Source: OANN

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Pompeo: Trump ‘will continue to ratchet up pressure’ on Iran

Pompeo testifies in Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testifies before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the State Department budget request in Washington, U.S. April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott

April 10, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday that President Donald Trump will continue to increase pressure on Iran, but declined further comment on the possibility of waivers for countries that import Iranian oil.

Pompeo told a U.S. Senate committee that he had “no announcements” on waivers, particularly in an unclassified setting. “I can assure the rest of the world that President Trump will continue to ratchet up the pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran so that their behavior will change,” Pompeo said.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Source: OANN

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Prosecutor who oversaw case against Trump lawyer Cohen to step down

U.S. Deputy Attorney Robert Khuzami speaks to the media after U.S. President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen plead guilty to eight criminal counts in New York
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Deputy Attorney Robert Khuzami speaks to the media outside the the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Court House after U.S. President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen plead guilty to eight criminal counts in lower Manhattan, New York City, U.S. August 21, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

March 22, 2019

(Reuters) – Robert Khuzami, the federal prosecutor who oversaw the case against President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, will step down from his role as Deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the U.S. Attorney’s office announced Friday.

Khuzami led the case against Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and other federal crimes, after U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman recused himself from the case.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: OANN

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In letters, Whitey Bulger fondly recalled old days, Alcatraz

Locked up for life after 16 years on the run, murderous Boston gang boss James "Whitey" Bulger couldn't stand how much the world around him had changed.

Prison was nothing like his days at Alcatraz, with its "great view" and clear-cut rules, Bulger said. And the former Irish Catholic stronghold of South Boston he once terrorized was now filled with "rich college kids living in expensive condos."

"World has changed ... everything different, even the neighborhood," Bulger wrote to a friend he met in the lockup in newly public letters.

The letters, which are being auctioned Sunday, provide a glimpse into the once powerful and feared gangster's mundane life behind bars before he was beaten to death by fellow inmates last year. Bulger wrote about the little excitements of prison life — "tonight we had an ice cream cone!" — and his treatment by other inmates.

"Almost every time I'm going anywhere, guys ask "hey old timer, want a push" ... or just grab handles and start pushing," Bulger wrote in a letter postmarked in February 2015. "One advantage is we can go in the front of chow line if in wheelchair."

Authorities have said two Massachusetts mobsters are under investigation for 89-year-old Bulger's killing, but no one has been charged. His death hours after he was transferred to a troubled West Virginia prison has raised questions about why the known "snitch" was placed in the general population instead of more protective housing.

Bulger ratted on the New England mob to the FBI, authorities said, though he insisted throughout his trial that he wasn't an informant but was actually paying the FBI for the scoop on his enemies.

The auction house got the letters from a man who says he became friends with Bulger when the geriatric gangster was briefly held at a federal lockup in Brooklyn after being convicted in 2013 of participating in 11 murders, among other crimes.

That man, Timothy Glass, said he took Bulger under his wing, and they bonded over their criminal pasts. Glass recalled how Bulger would sign autographs for inmates who asked but had a tendency to give a "death stare" to guys he didn't like.

"I was like, 'this guy is a stone-cold killer at like 80 years old.' It was wild," Glass, 55, told The Associated Press.

Glass was locked up on robbery and other charges when he met Bulger after spending more than a decade in New York state prison for separate crimes, he said. Inmates weren't allowed to write to one another, so after Bulger was transferred to a different prison, Bulger would send the letters to a friend on the outside, who would get them to Glass, he said.

In the letters, Bulger complained about the cost of books ("$32 for the book!"), the cold weather ("All the liberals like VP Gore made a fortune with his scaring people with talk of 'planet warming''') and the media, which he called "part of and parcel of the corruption instead of society 'watchdogs.'"

He grumbled about his trial, slammed prosecutors for deals they made with his former friends and promised his appeal would "create quite a stir." He also bemoaned what he saw as the unfair treatment of his longtime girlfriend Catherine Grieg, who was sentenced to eight years for helping Bulger avoid capture.

"I played a rough game and accepted the rough treatment. But feel Catherine was treated too harshly," Bulger wrote.

He talked longingly about his time at "The Rock" — Alcatraz — where the rules were "plain and understood" and inmates were allowed at Christmastime to buy chocolate, which they would share with prisoners who weren't supposed to have candy.

"Here, 'they,' the 'inmates,' would sell you chocolate! Back then no one ever looked to make a profit on another convict," he wrote. "I look back at those years and place with nostalgia. It's all gone."

Tucked into some of the letters were pictures of Bulger as a young man or Alcatraz. On the back of one of the photo — a mugshot taken in 1965, the year Bulger was released from prison and returned to South Boston — he scribbled: "the good old days."

With another letter, Bulger included a holiday card that he apparently made in 2015 with the message in gold script: "Wishing you peace & cheer in the New Year." Next to the cheery greeting is Bulger's Alcatraz mugshot, his eyes piercing blue eyes narrowed and brows furrowed.

___

Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://www.twitter.com/aedurkinricher

Source: Fox News National

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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