Sister of Owais Malik, a suspected militant, displays her phone with the picture of Malik, at her home in south Kashmir's Kulgam district February 16, 2019. REUTERS/Zeba Siddiqui
March 24, 2019
By Zeba Siddiqui and Fayaz Bukhari
KULGAM, India (Reuters) – Kashmiri farmer Yusuf Malik learned that his son Owais, a 22-year old arts student and apple picker, had become an armed militant via a Facebook post.
Days after Owais disappeared from his home in this picturesque valley below the Himalayan ranges, his picture appeared on the social network, posted by a user the family said they did not recognize. The short, thin, curly-haired young man in casual jeans and a T-shirt stared resolutely at the camera, both hands clutching an AK-47 rifle.
In blood red font on the photo was scribbled his new allegiance: the Hizbul Mujahideen, or ‘The Party of Warriors’, the largest of the militant groups fighting to free the mostly-Muslim Kashmir from Indian rule.
“He was a responsible kid who cared about his studies,” said Yusuf, 49, staring down at the carpeted floor of his brick home where he sat on a recent winter morning, clasping his folded hands inside his traditional pheran cloak.
The family said it has not heard from Owais since.
Owais is one of a rising number of local militants fighting for independence of Kashmir – an insurgency being spread on social media amid India’s sustained, iron-fisted rule of the region.
Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops and armed police are stationed in this lush region at the foot of the Himalayas. India and rival Pakistan have always disputed the area and in the past three decades, an uprising against New Delhi’s rule has killed nearly 50,000 civilians, militants and soldiers, by official count.
Historically, that insurrection has largely been led by militants from Pakistan, who have infiltrated into the valley.
But now, an increasing number of locally-born Kashmiris are picking up arms, according to Indian officials. About 400 local Kashmiris have been recruited by militants since the start of 2016, nearly double the number in the previous six years, according to government data. India says Pakistani groups continue to provide training and arms – a claim Islamabad rejects.
Just a month before Owais Malik showed up on Facebook, another young man, Adil Ahmad Dar, left his home in a nearby part of Kashmir to join a militant group. This February, his suicide attack on a paramilitary convoy killed 40 Indian policemen, and took India and Pakistan to the brink of war.
After Dar’s attack, Indian security forces launched a major crackdown, searching Kashmiri homes and detaining hundreds of supporters, sympathizers and family members of those in armed groups. At least half a dozen gunbattles broke out between Indian police and militants.
The families of Dar and other young militants, as well as some local leaders and political experts, say run-ins between locals and security forces are one of the main reasons for anger and radicalization. After the recent crackdown, they expect more young people to take up arms.
“FREEDOM, MARTYRS”
Outside the narrow lane that leads to the Malik family home in Kulgam in southern Kashmir, children walk to school past shuttered shopfronts and walls spray-painted with the word “azadi”, the local word for “freedom”. The graveyard at the end of the lane has an area for militants, who are remembered as “martyrs”.
Dar’s family claims he’d been radicalized in 2016 after being beaten up by Indian troops on his way back from school for pelting stones at them.
“Since then, he wanted to join the militants,” said his father Ghulam Hassan Dar, a farmer.
India’s home and foreign ministries did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
In news conferences since the suicide bombing, Lt. Gen. K.J.S. Dhillon, India’s top military commander in Kashmir, has dismissed allegations of harassment and rights abuses by Indian troops as “propaganda”. He said the recent crackdown by security forces has resulted in the killing of the masterminds of the attack, and militant recruitment has dipped in recent months.
Syed Ata Hasnain, a retired army general who has served in Kashmir for over 20 years, said the rise in homegrown fighters does not surprise him.
“Those who were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the conflict started, have now come of age,” he said. “This is a generation that has only seen the jackboot. The alienation of this generation is higher than the alienation of the previous generation.”
A 17th century Mughal emperor called Kashmir “paradise on earth”. But violence has ebbed and flowed in the valley since the subcontinent was divided into predominantly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan after independence from Britain in 1947.
The question of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, was never resolved, and it has been the catalyst for two wars and several violent clashes between the countries.
Tensions have risen after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in New Delhi in 2014. Modi promised a tougher approach to Pakistan and gave security forces the license to retaliate forcefully against the insurgency.
CULT FOLLOWING
Around that time, many young Kashmiris started rallying around Burhan Wani, who had left home at the age of 15 to join the insurgency. Wani had a large following on social media, where he appeared in videos dressed in military fatigues and armed with an assault rifle, calling for an uprising against Indian rule.
He and his brother were beaten by security forces when they were teenagers, his family told local media. Wani was 22 when he was killed by security forces in 2016 and thousands attended his funeral despite restrictions on the movement of people and traffic.
The United Nations said in a report last year that in trying to quell mass protests in Kashmir since 2016, Indian security forces used excessive force that led to between 130 and 145 killings, according to civil society estimates.
Thousands were injured, including around 700 who sustained eye injuries from the use of pellet guns by security forces, it said. Thousands of people had simply disappeared since the insurgency began, it said.
The Indian government has rejected the report as false. Indian forces have long been accused of rights abuses and torture in custody in Kashmir, but officials routinely deny the charges.
Instead, India points the finger at Pakistan. Officials say the rebellion in Kashmir is being funded and organized by Pakistan and if they cut off those resources, the insurgency will weaken and it can then focus on building Kashmir’s economy. The Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group claimed responsibility for the latest attack, which was the deadliest in the insurgency.
Pakistan says it only provides moral support to the Kashmiri right to self-determination.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the Muslim spiritual leader of Kashmir who is considered a moderate separatist, contests that India has true plans to engage politically with the people of Kashmir.
“In the past five years we have seen that the government of India has only spoken to Kashmiris through the barrel of the gun, that’s it. There is no political approach,” he said.
“Nobody is dying in Kashmir for lack of roads, electricity and water.”
LOSING ANOTHER SON
A few miles south of Owais Malik’s home in Kulgam lives Masuma Begum, who said her son and brother had been called in to an army camp two days after the latest bombing and have been held since then.
A military spokesman could not be reached for comment.
Behind the glass panes of a wall shelf above her were photos of a smiling young man, an assault rifle slung on his shoulder.
“That’s my other son, Tausif,” Masuma Begum said. The 24-year-old had joined the Hizbul Mujahideen in 2013 and been killed by the army the same year, she said. “I don’t want to lose another son.”
(Reporting by Zeba Siddiqui and Fayaz Bukhari in KULGAM; Editing by Martin Howell and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Two weeks after Chase Bank announced that it would no longer do business with Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, Conservative performance artist and Rebel Media personality Martina Markota has become the latest conservative media figure to be targeted by the bank which has made no secret of its support for liberal causes (see its decision to cut ties with the gun industry).
In an interview with Big League Politics, Markota explained that the account that was shuttered had been linked to an Indiegogo campaign that Markota had used to raise more than $34,000 for a graphic novel that she had been working on, which made the decision to shut down the account more of a financial burden for her.
Markota was mailed a letter form the bank, which she shared on twitter.
When she contacted the bank to try and figure out why the account had been shut down, Markota said they refused to give her a reason. She believes that the decision was politically motivated due to her support for President Trump.
Upon getting notice of her account shutdown, Markota contacted Chase Bank by phone to ask why her account was shut down.
“They refused to tell me why,” Markota stated. “They said they have the right to end our relationship and not tell me why.”
She began to believe that her bank account shutdown was was politically motivated after reading Big League Politics‘ story on Tarrio. This suspicion is well warranted considering the fact that her outspoken support for President Trump has exposed her to a torrent of harassment in recent years.
Markota added that she has been the victim of harassment from former coworkers when she was a burlesque dancer.
Markota’s former co-workers from her burlesque days have been on a crusade to make her life miserable ever since she came out as a Trump supporter.
Their harassment got so bad that Markota is pursuing legal action against the most vicious tormentor.
If political motivations were in fact behind her de-platforming, that would make Markota the latest in a string of conservatives including Alex Jones, Laura Loomer and Jordan Peterson who have been financially targeted for their political views by what are still perceived as unbiased, apolitical organizations, when in reality financial isolation and boycotts is precisely how outspoken, ideologically opposing voices get silenced.
FILE - In this April 3, 2019, file photo, former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn, center, leaves his lawyer's office in Tokyo. Nissan Chief Executive Hiroto Saikawa has apologized to shareholders for the unfolding scandal at the Japanese automaker and asked for their approval to oust from the board former Chairman Ghosn, who has been arrested on financial misconduct charges. Saikawa and other Nissan Motor Co. executives bowed deeply at a Tokyo hotel Monday, April 8, 2019, where the extraordinary shareholders' meeting was being held. (Sadayuki Goto/Kyodo News via AP, File)
TOKYO – The lawyers for Nissan's former Chairman Carlos Ghosn, who was sent back to detention while out on bail, have filed a protest with the Japanese Supreme Court.
The appeal was filed Wednesday.
Lawyer Junichiro Hironaka told reporters that Ghosn's fourth and latest arrest is unfair.
Ghosn was arrested in November, released on bail last month but re-arrested last week.
Multiple arrests and long detentions are routine in Japan, but arresting a suspect who cleared bail is unusual.
Ghosn's detention has been extended through Sunday but may be prolonged. He is charged with falsifying financial documents and breach of trust. He says he is innocent.
The latest arrest is over suspicion Nissan money paid to a dealership that was diverted to a company effectively controlled by Ghosn.
FILE PHOTO: A woman photographs cars on display at the 2019 New York International Auto Show in New York City, New York, U.S, April 17, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
April 17, 2019
By Nick Carey and David Shepardson
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Major automakers are bullish on the outlook for the U.S. economy and auto sales, but one big question remains – will President Donald Trump throw a grenade into the sector by imposing sweeping tariffs of up to 25 percent on car and auto parts imports?
The industry is in “wait-and-see mode,” but the tariffs would be a bad idea, Bob Carter, head of U.S. sales at Toyota Motor Corp, told Reuters on Wednesday.
“If the tariff happened on the auto industry, quite frankly that’s pulling the pin out of the grenade,” he said at a conference on Tuesday held in conjunction with the New York International Auto Show. “I don’t believe the U.S. economy can run out of the room fast enough if that happens.”
Carter said in an interview he was optimistic the Trump administration would decide against tariffs, yet “uncomfortable” given the president’s decision last year to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
Trump ran for office in 2016 on a protectionist platform aimed at shoring up U.S. manufacturing jobs. He has said in the past he was considering tariffs on autos and auto parts of up to 25 percent.
In February, the U.S. Commerce Department sent recommendations to Trump, which auto industry officials expect to include at least some tariffs on fully assembled vehicles or on critical technologies and components related to electric, automated, connected and shared vehicles.
Such tariffs would have a deeper impact on car prices and consumers than earlier metals tariffs that were imposed. The steel and aluminum tariffs cost Detroit automakers General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co $1 billion each and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV said they could add up to $350 million in costs in 2019.
HEAVY LOBBYING
Trump is supposed to make a decision by mid-May, but some officials think the administration will find a way to delay final action, using the threat as leverage to try to win concessions on autos in trade talks with Japan and the European Union.
Joe Eberhardt, chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover North America, said a 25 percent tariff on all imported vehicles would cost the company “billions.” If the tariffs were on parts, it would also hit U.S. automakers hard, he noted.
“We just hope that reason will prevail,” he said.
Toyota and other automakers have been lobbying heavily to block any new tariffs on imported vehicles, arguing the industry’s global supply chain is so intertwined that tariffs would raise prices, hurt sales and thus damage the economy.
IMPACT ON PRICES
At a conference held ahead of the New York auto show this week, IHS Markit’s chief U.S. economist, Joel Prakken, forecast 2019 U.S. new vehicle sales of 16.8 million units, down about 500,000 units from 2018 but still high historically.
However, tariffs could reduce sales by another 2 million vehicles and shave half to two-thirds of a percentage point off U.S. gross domestic product, he said.
“It would be horrible for the automotive industry, it will be horrible for consumers and it will be horrible for the U.S. economy,” said Fred Diaz, the U.S. chief executive of Mitsubishi Motors Corp.
In one example, Carter said 72 percent of the parts for the Camry sedan that Toyota makes in Kentucky come from U.S. suppliers, but 28 percent are imported. A 25 percent tariff would cause that car’s price to rise $1,800 overnight.
“There is no such thing as a 100 percent U.S. vehicle,” he told Reuters.
According to industry estimates, broad tariffs could add an average of $4,000 to a new car’s sticker price.
Nissan Motor Co Ltd’s North American chairman, Jose Valls, said the automaker has “invested very heavily in the U.S. and they (the Trump administration) need to take into account our customers and our employees.”
“We’ll adjust,” Valls said. “But we’re not taking decisions on things that haven’t been finalized yet.”
Mitsubishi’s Diaz said industry groups are lobbying hard against the tariffs.
“The feedback is that we’re being heard,” he said. “But fundamentally, how do you really know?”
(Reporting by Nick Carey and David Shepardson in New York; Editing by Ben Klayman and Matthew Lewis)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made quite the splash at this year’s SXSW conference, and it wasn’t just for her attacks on capitalism or labeling Ronald Reagan a racist.
No, the youngest congresswoman in history is making a much bigger statement with her actions, and it’s clear they have nothing to do with the socialist policies she espouses in her Green New Deal.
Twitter user Antonia Ferrier – a PR rep and “recovering Senate GOP flak” – was the latest to take note of the millennial lawmaker’s blatant hypocrisy when she posted a picture Monday of the lawmaker’s arrival at the conference this weekend.
“She arrived in a big, gas guzzling SUV. #GreenNewDeal #SXSW19” Ferrier posted.
The image shows Ocasio-Cortez stepping out of the massive vehicle with an aide in tow – waiving as an attendant held the door open with a plastic bottle in clear view.
A short time later, Ocasio-Cortez lectured about the failure of moderates to address climate change and explained why the outlandish proposals in her Green New Deal are a better approach.
“It feels like moderate is not a stance it just an attitude toward life that’s like ‘eh,’” she said. “But here’s the thing that upsets me is that we’ve become so cynical that we view ‘meh,’ or ‘eh,’ or we view cynicism as an intellectually superior attitude.
“And we view ambition as youthful naivete when … the greatest things we have ever accomplished as a society have been ambitious acts of visions,” she said. “The ‘meh’ is worshiped now. For what? Like, for what?”
Ironically, the ‘meh’ attitude seems to be the same perspective Ocasio-Cortez takes when it comes to her own efforts to do her part to save the planet. The Green New Deal is based on the premise that climate change will destroy the planet in just over a decade if Americans don’t take drastic action, including the elimination of gas cars and planes.
The New York Post pointed out the freshman Congresswoman doesn’t exactly practice what she preaches. In a column last week, the news site slammed AOC for relying heavily on Uber, Lyft, and other car services during her campaign, despite the fact that a subway station was just 138 feet from her campaign office.
Her campaign spend nearly $30,000 on gas vehicles compared to just $8,335 on the metro.
Once she beat incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, her campaign spent another $25,000 on airline tickets.
Then there’s also her famous Instagram videos, in which AOC discusses saving the planet while making dinner.
From the Post:
In a Feb. 24 Instagram video filmed in her kitchen, Ocasio-Cortez railed against plastic grocery bags — then appeared to toss two of the sacks, which can be recycled, into the trash.
“It drives me crazy,” she said of plastic bags. “I wish they didn’t exist.”
In the video, Ocasio-Cortez peeled a sweet potato while calling for a “universal sense of urgency” to save the Earth.
HELSINKI – The Latest on the Viking Sky cruise ship, which is having engine problems off the coast of Norway (all times local):
6 p.m.
Norwegian officials say rescue workers have managed to evacuate about 100 people so far from a cruise ship that ran into engine problems in heavy winds and seas and sent a mayday call off Norway's western coast.
Authorities kicked off an evacuation on Saturday afternoon of the estimated 1,300 passengers and crew from the Viking Sky cruise ship. Rescue teams with helicopters and boats have been sent to help, and the evacuation process expected to take several hours.
Norwegian newspaper VG said the Viking Sky into propulsion problems as strong winds and heavy seas hit Norway's coastal regions and had to moor in Hustadsvika Bay, between the western Norwegian cities of Alesund and Trondheim.
The Viking Sky was delivered in 2017 to operator Viking Ocean Cruises.
___
5:15 p.m.
Police say a cruise ship with engine problems has sent a mayday call off Norway's western coast and is making plans to evacuate its 1,300 passengers and crew.
Norwegian newspaper VG said the Viking Sky cruise ship ran into propulsion problems as strong winds and heavy seas hit Norway's coastal regions Saturday.
Police in the western county of Moere og Romsdal said Saturday the ship has managed to moor in Hustadsvika Bay, between the western Norwegian cities of Alesund and Trondheim.
Rescue teams with helicopters and boats have been sent to help and evacuate the vessel, a process expected to take several hours.
The Viking Sky was delivered in 2017 to operator Viking Ocean Cruises.
FILE PHOTO: The HSBC bank is seen in the financial district of Canary Wharf in London, Britain, July 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Coombs
March 19, 2019
By Sinead Cruise and Lawrence White
LONDON (Reuters) – HSBC is stepping up a root-and-branch overhaul of its global banking and markets division, naming 83 new managing directors in a 1,300-strong promotions spree aimed at revitalizing its investment banking franchise.
After another year of underwhelming performance in 2018, HSBC’s management team – bolstered by new finance chief and ex-investment banker Ewen Stevenson – are plotting a push to recover ground lost to rivals, with a revamp of its trading floor seen as top priority, sources close to HSBC said.
Samir Assaf, chief executive of global banking and markets, distributed a memo last Monday pointing out the significant rise in the number of women promoted this year.
HSBC is trying to close a gender pay gap of 61 percent, the worst among major British firms and largely caused by a lack of women in senior, higher paid roles.
Around a third of the 83 new managing directors are female, the memo seen by Reuters showed, a 13 percentage point rise from the previous year, according to a source at the bank with knowledge of the matter.
A spokesman for HSBC declined to comment.
The wave of promotions comes just weeks after the bank axed dozens of sales and advisory jobs in London following an extended period of turmoil in its investment banking operations.
Last year saw an exodus of high-profile dealmakers in Europe, with sources saying there was frustration at a lack of a clear strategy.
36 of the promotions are in HSBC’s global banking business, which includes its mergers and acquisitions and equity advisory bankers.
The bank has also poached senior hires from rivals, including former JPMorgan banker Greg Guyett as head of global banking and former Goldman Sachs banker Peter Enns as the global head of its financial institutions group.
HSBC tumbled further in investment banking league tables in some key market segments in 2018, with its fourth quarter performance in equities particularly weak.
Revenues there fell 20 percent from a year earlier, the second worst performance among major investment banks after France’s BNP Paribas.
HSBC slipped to 20th among global equity deal bookrunners in 2018 from 16th the previous year, according to Refinitiv data. It also fell to 24th from 19th in the rankings for advising on completed mergers and acquisitions.
The bank fared better in its traditional stronghold of debt underwriting, placing 6th according to Refinitiv data, with revenues growing 14 percent in its transaction banking business.
MOOD LIFT
Investors are pinning their hopes on Georges Elhedery to improve productivity and lift the mood in the bank’s global markets business, after he took over the division from caretaker boss Thierry Roland on Friday.
Elhedery, who is relocating to London from Dubai to take up the role, is filling a position vacated by veteran HSBC banker Thibaut de Roux in September last year.
25 of the new promotions are in global markets, and other high-ranking appointments are in progress.
Nathalie Safar, one of the investment bank’s most senior women, is leaving her position as global equities chief operating officer after eight years in the role, a second staff memo seen by Reuters showed.
She will take up a newly-created position of head of front to back resource and cost management, focusing on making savings that will fund investments in the bank’s growth areas.
A search for her successor is underway, the memo said.
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.”
The U.S. government say Butina was part of an unofficial influence campaign that overlapped with the 2016 presidential election and targeted conservatives; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from the U.S. district court in Washington.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].”
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.
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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, 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)
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