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Japanese court approves Ghosn bail request, sets bail at $4.5 million

FILE PHOTO : Former Nissan Motor Chairman Carlos Ghosn sits inside a car as he leaves his lawyer's office after being released on bail from Tokyo Detention House, in Tokyo
FILE PHOTO : Former Nissan Motor Chairman Carlos Ghosn sits inside a car as he leaves his lawyer's office after being released on bail from Tokyo Detention House, in Tokyo, Japan, March 6, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato

April 25, 2019

Source: OANN

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Barrasso: Republicans Against Trump Order Want Border Security

Every one of the 12 Republican Senators who voted for a resolution opposing President Donald Trump's emergency order for the border is committed and united to securing the border, despite their vote, Sen. John Barrasso, who voted against the resolution, said Friday.

"I stand with the president," the Wyoming Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "His veto will be sustained. There aren't enough votes to override the president."

Republicans who voted against the resolution want money to be there to secure the border, but wanted that to happen through the appropriations process, not through an executive order, said Barrasso, adding that he would have also preferred to do it that way.

"Ever since Donald Trump was elected president what we have seen are Democrats obstructing him every step along the way that they can do it, even to the expense of our own nation's security," said Barrasso. "To me, border security is national security."

Barrasso also commented about the upcoming procedural being called on the "Green New Deal," which to him shows Democrats are "careening over the liberal cliff," with their support of the environmental plan and other "hard-line" positions, including on healthcare and abortion.

"We have presidential candidates on the Democrat side who want to eliminate immigration customs enforcement," said Barrasso. "They want to eliminate some of the barriers that are already there. We need barriers at the border. The president has been strong on that. They want to take them down."

Barrasso also spoke out about the New Zealand mosque massacres, saying it is "disturbing" when such murders happen when people are worshipping.

"The world continues to be a dangerous place and we'll continue in the war against terrorism," said the senator.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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ZTE Corp controlling shareholder plans 3 percent stake sale after stock rebound

FILE PHOTO: People walk past a ZTE logo outside its booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
FILE PHOTO: People walk past a ZTE logo outside its booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 25, 2019. REUTERS/Sergio Perez/File Photo

March 13, 2019

By Sijia Jiang

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corp’s controlling shareholder plans to reduce its stake by as much as 3 percent after the stock more than doubled in value since surviving a U.S. sanction last year, showed regulatory filings late on Tuesday.

The stock slumped as much as 7.6 percent in Shenzhen on Wednesday following the news. Its Hong Kong-listed shares dropped as much as 5.6 percent.

The Chinese firm was crippled early last year after breaking U.S. sanctions and was only able to resume business in July after paying $1.4 billion in penalties to lift a U.S. supplier ban. The stock has since risen around 150 percent in Shenzhen.

ZTE in the filings said state-owned controlling shareholder Zhongxingxin Telecom plans to sell up to 2 percent in ZTE A-shares via block trades within 90 days. Zhongxingxin has also proposed to use not more than 41.9 million ZTE A-shares, or 1 percent of the company’s total share capital, to subscribe for units in the ICBCCS SHSZ 300 exchange-traded fund.

(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

Source: OANN

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Franklin Graham: Buittigieg Should Repent, Not Flaunt, Being Gay

Evangelical leader Franklin Graham on Wednesday chastised Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg for being gay, calling homosexuality a “sin” that the South Bend, Ind., mayor and war veteran ought to “repent.”

In a tweet, Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, called out the candidate, who is a newlywed, and whose candidacy has been surging in early polls.

“Mayor Buttigieg says he’s a gay Christian,” Graham tweeted. “As a Christian I believe the Bible which defines homosexuality as sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized. The Bible says marriage is between a man & a woman — not two men, not two women.”

The tweet follows a  CNN town hall in New Hampshire on Tuesday during which Buttigieg said, “I get that one of the things about Scripture is different people see different things in it.”

“At the very least we should be able to establish that God does not have a political party,” he said.

“It can be challenging to be a person of faith who’s also part of the LGBTQ community and yet, to me, the core of faith is regard for one another,” Buttigieg added. “And part of God’s love is experienced, according to my faith tradition, is in the way that we support one another and, in particular, support the least among us.”

Source: NewsMax Politics

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French foreign minister at German Cabinet under new pact

France's foreign minister is attending a meeting of Germany's Cabinet, following up on a friendship treaty that the two European powers signed earlier this year.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said as he welcomed French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on Wednesday he hoped the visit was "setting in motion a long-lasting tradition." The two ministers are set to meet again in New York later this week, where Germany is coordinating its presidency of the U.N. Security Council in April with France's presidency this month.

France and Germany signed a pact in January renewing the decades-old friendship between two countries that have traditionally led European integration but also had frequent disagreements. It calls for a member of one country's government to attend the other's Cabinet at least once per quarter.

Source: Fox News World

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Enbridge pipeline delay spooks traders in long-term Canada crude market

Crude oil tanks at Enbridge's terminal are seen in Sherwood Park
A sign listing emergency contacts for the companies on "Pipeline Alley" (Kinder Morgan, Enbridge and Keyera Energy) are seen at an industrial zone dubbed "Refinery Row" in Sherwood Park, near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada November 13, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Helgren

March 10, 2019

By Devika Krishna Kumar and Nia Williams

NEW YORK/CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – North American energy traders are reluctant to take up long-term positions on Canadian crude price moves, preferring to stick to spot deals, as uncertainty around government intervention in the market grows following delays to a critical pipeline project.

Enbridge Inc unexpectedly said earlier this month its Line 3 oil pipeline will be delayed until the second half of 2020, dealing another blow to the oil-rich province of Alberta, which is struggling with long-running congestion on export pipelines.

Severe pipeline bottlenecks depressed Canadian heavy oil prices to the weakest on record last year, prompting the Alberta government to order mandatory production cuts effective Jan. 1, a move that sent prices sky-rocketing and traders scrambling to cover positions.

While some producers welcomed the government cuts, others including Suncor Energy and Imperial Oil criticized the move for causing uncertainty and unintended consequences, such as disrupting rail shipments of crude.

Imperial declined to comment and Suncor did not offer an immediate comment.

Now, Enbridge’s delay has heightened concerns the government may impose cuts for longer than its current target of year-end.

“Everything we heard from the government was that they were 100 percent relying on Line 3 coming into service at the end of 2019,” said Tim Pickering, president of Auspice Capital Advisors in Calgary, which manages a Canadian crude exchange-traded fund.

“That (delay) is definitely something that may have them responding as the market changes,” he added.

Canada is the world’s fourth biggest oil producer and the heavy crude it produces is in high demand in the United States, where refiners are already facing a shortage due to sanctions on Venezuela and lower production from Mexico.

But sources at producers and refiners on both sides of the border said it has become more difficult to make a compelling case to management to buy Canadian oil contracts for later in the year because of the uncertainty related to what the government might do.

BROKEN TRUST

Not being able to lock in forward prices typically heightens risk for producers and refiners, leaving them more exposed to fluctuating spot commodity prices.

Longer-dated trading volumes in the Canadian heavy benchmark Western Canada Select (WCS) vary each month, making year-on-year comparisons of trading volumes difficult, traders said.

But buyers of Canadian crude in the U.S. Gulf Coast have held back from taking up positions to hedge their exposure or betting on Canadian prices for later in the year for fear of big losses if the government makes an unexpected move, sources said.

“I won’t take any forward positions in Canada right now. Everyone is wondering what the government is going to do … one announcement can ruin your year,” one trader said.

Hedge funds – who typically trade financial contracts rather than physical barrels – are also reluctant to get involved in Canada now, Pickering said, leading to a thinner market with fewer participants.

Liquidity in the Canadian crude ETF that Auspice manages surged last October as Canadian crude’s discount to U.S. oil futures ballooned, attracting big U.S. market makers like Virtu Financial and Jane Street, Pickering said. That liquidity dropped off once the government stepped in.

Further muddying the picture, current Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s New Democratic Party government is currently trailing in the polls ahead of a spring election, facing a stiff challenge from the United Conservative Party.

It is unclear what impact the elections would have on planned curtailments.

Alberta government spokesman Mike McKinnon said the cuts had been applied fairly and equitably.

“A short-term production limit is not ideal or sustainable, which is exactly why we have a plan to move more oil by rail in the coming months while we fight for the long-term solution of building pipelines to new markets,” he said.

One Calgary-based trader said the Alberta government had ruined trust in the Canadian heavy crude market. Market participants who were bearish 2019 WCS because of fundamentals like rising production and tight pipeline capacity were wrong-footed by the curtailments and ended up losing “a ton of money,” he said.

“I just think it’s too risky now. So no one is trading that far out,” another Calgary-based trader said.

(Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar in New York and Nia Williams in Calgary, Alberta; Editing by Chris Reese)

Source: OANN

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‘Coffee club’ loved early fellowship; then attacker hit

Camaraderie was so important for the "coffee club" at RJR Maintenance and Management that the four unofficial members often arrived at work early just to enjoy one another's company, mugs in hand, before other employees arrived and the workday began.

But that friendly calm was shattered around 7:30 a.m. on April 1, when a person armed with a gun and a knife entered the company's office building in Mandan, North Dakota, through the one unlocked door. Within 13 minutes, those four friends became the victims of a horrific deadly attack.

Jackie Fakler's memories of arriving at the building that morning are bleak. She had planned to drive to work with her husband, Robert — they co-owned the business — but a last-minute decision sent him on ahead.

"I knew Robert was in there. I wasn't sure what happened," Fakler said. "I knew they were doing CPR on him. I did not know about the other three victims at the time. And then it was panic, doing a head count with all the employees — who was there, and who wasn't."

Fakler said at first she thought her husband had suffered cardiac arrest.

"But when I saw blood on the floor, I knew it wasn't a heart attack," she said.

According to a police affidavit, the intruder attacked the four friends one by one. Robert Fakler was stabbed and cut multiple times. Adam Fuehrer, Bill Cobb and his wife, Lois, were all stabbed and shot. The attacker sliced Lois Cobb's neck.

Chad Isaak , a Washburn chiropractor who lived on property managed by RJR, has been charged with four counts of murder, but police haven't identified a motive. Those close to the victims say they have no idea what prompted the assault.

Office manager Deanna Finnie tagged the four the coffee club, claiming they could get through an entire pot before anyone else even arrived at work. Fakler said that collective defined the close-knit community at RJR.

"You don't get that with most companies," Fakler said. "They came in just to spend time with each other before the work day."

The Cobbs and Faklers were friends who sometimes vacationed together. Fuehrer would help out at the Faklers' hobby farm, and in return would get a butchered pig every year. Company holiday parties typically have 100% turnout, and "this is like home to a lot of people," marketing executive Ben Pace said.

Confusion reigned as other employees showed up for the start of the workweek not long after the attack. Police blocked off the road leading to the RJR building in the busy Mandan business district known as The Strip. Surviving colleagues were still being questioned by law enforcement when news media started to release details about the killings, Pace said.

The company closed for two days.

"This is not something you just bounce back from," Fakler said. "My head was spinning a lot. We got everybody together that Tuesday after, and I asked the employees if they wanted to continue on, and they all said yes."

Two weeks later, idle chatter fills the reception area, phones ring regularly, and renters file in and out doing business at the front desk. Mementos of Robert Fakler's hobbies adorn the walls of the conference room — a picture of racing legend Dale Earnhardt, memorabilia of the local minor league baseball and hockey teams.

"It feels like it's been a lifetime and a blink all in the same time," Pace said.

Security has been heightened, but it's not apparent. People who come in aren't treated any differently than before.

"I can't judge everybody who walks through my front door by one individual," Fakler said. "And I think we've got a pretty good crew that understands that, too."

Support from the community has helped, including a deluge of cards, well-wishes and fundraising efforts. For Jackie, someone mailed a gift box to the office that contained a wrist band she treasures. It is adorned with the first initials of the four victims, along with charms associated with each.

"For somebody to just anonymously send it to me, it was like, it's just amazing how people are," Fakler said.

That support is helping the business move forward, along with the already tight bonds among workers.

"This incident didn't make us a family, an RJR family. We were that before any of this happened," Finnie said.

But they acknowledge that RJR won't be the same without the "coffee club."

"They could be jokesters over some of the dumbest things," Fakler said, laughing and crying at the same time.

"It would be nice to hear the laughter in the back when they'd start up. I think that's the one thing, I don't know if that will ever come back."

___

Follow Blake Nicholson on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/NicholsonBlake

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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Source: InfoWars

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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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