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Smartphone shipments to China hit six-year low in February: market data

Mobile phones are seen on display at an electronics market in Shanghai
FILE PHOTO: Mobile phones are seen on display at an electronics market in Shanghai, China, June 24, 2015. REUTERS/Aly Song

March 13, 2019

By Josh Horwitz

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Smartphone shipments to China in February fell to their lowest in six years, market data indicated, as consumers continued to put off handset purchases amid a slowing economy.

Shipments to the world’s biggest smartphone market totaled 14.5 million units, down 19.9 percent from a year ago, according to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government-affiliated research institute.

That is the lowest since February 2013, when shipments to the China totaled 20.7 million.

Overall consumer purchases typically slow during February as the Chinese spend much of the month with family celebrating the Lunar New Year. But shipments this year fell more than usual as a slowing economy, exacerbated by a Sino-U.S. trade war, hurt demand for gadgets across the board.

Apple cited slowing iPhone sales in China when it took the rare step of cutting its sales forecast earlier this year. The firm then teamed up with China’s Ant Financial and local banks to offer interest-free iPhone financing in its first such move in the country as it looked to boost waning sales.

Several third-party retailers have also offered iPhones at discounted prices.

With smartphone sales expected to stay weak, companies like Chinese market leader Huawei Technologies have aimed to launch more expensive models to corner higher margins.

In 2018, Huawei’s market share of China’s $500-$800 device segment rose to 26.6 percent from 8.8 percent, according to Counterpoint Research. Apple’s share fell to 54.6 percent from 81.2 percent as it launched devices cracking the $1,000 price point, while others released competitive devices for less.

(Reporting by Josh Horwitz; Editing by Himani Sarkar)

Source: OANN

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Hillary Clinton to join DNC's Perez at party fundraiser

Hillary Clinton is jumping back into the fundraising game, even if she's not running for president again.

The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee will join Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez later this month for a fundraiser in Washington as the party looks to take back the White House in next year’s election, a source familiar with the event confirmed to Fox News.

The event, expected to be attended by roughly 20-30 people, is being billed as a “dinner and conversation” and comes as Democratic candidates are ramping up their campaigns to challenge President Trump in the 2020 election.

HILLARY CLINTON SAYS SHE'S NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT

The news of the Clinton event comes a day after the DNC announced it will hold its 2020 national convention in Milwaukee – in a nod to the party’s hopes of winning back Midwestern working-class voters who voted for Trump in a state that Clinton famously avoided in 2016.

Clinton, a former secretary of State under President Barack Obama, has ruled out running for president in 2020. She previously lost the Democratic nomination to Obama in 2008 and to Trump in the general election in 2016.

"I'm not running, but I'm going to keep on working and speaking and standing up for what I believe," Clinton told a local New York news station earlier this month, but added that she is "not going anywhere."

"What's at stake in our country, the kind of things that are happening right now are deeply troubling to me. And I'm also thinking hard about how do we start talking and listening to each other again?" she said. "We've just gotten so polarized. We've gotten into really opposing camps unlike anything I've ever seen in my adult life."

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Clinton has met with numerous Democratic presidential contenders over the last few months, including California Sen. Kamala Harris, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. She also sat down with former Vice President Joe Biden in February, as he mulls entering the Democratic presidential fray.

Other Democrats Clinton has met with about the 2020 race include former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, an aide said. She has also spoken over the phone with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Fox News' Amy Lieu contributed to this report. 

Source: Fox News Politics

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Trump: McCabe Has Made 'Fool Out of Himself'

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has made "a fool out of himself" over the past few days sharing guarded and private processes on national television, President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday.

"He really looks to me like a poor man's J. Edgar Hoover," added the president.

McCabe on Sunday during a bombshell interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" said he started the obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations involving Trump and his ties to Russia because he wanted to ensure the probe was on "solid ground" in case he was fired. He took the action following James Comey's firing.

"I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage," McCabe said. "And that was something that troubled me greatly."

McCabe, who was fired after an inspector general report found he lied to FBI agents and Comey about his decision to authorize a leak to the news media, also asserted in his interview it is possible Trump is a Russian agent.

"What he was trying to do was terrible," Trump said. "He was caught. I'm very proud to say we caught him. So, we'll see what happens. But he is a disgraced man. He was terminated, not by me. He was terminated by others."

Source: NewsMax America

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Roche lifts 2019 outlook as first-quarter sales beat forecasts

FILE PHOTO: Logo of Swiss drugmaker Roche is seen at its headquarters in Basel
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Swiss drugmaker Roche is seen at its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland February 1, 2018. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

April 17, 2019

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss drugmaker Roche raised its 2019 outlook after first-quarter sales beat analyst forecasts on the strength of newer medicines including multiple sclerosis treatment Ocrevus and cancer immunotherapy Tecentriq.

Roche said sales are now expected to grow in the mid-single digit range, at constant exchange rates.

Revenue in the first quarter rose to 14.8 billion Swiss francs ($14.70 billion), compared to the 14.2 billion franc average forecast in a poll for Reuters. Ocrevus sales rose 67 percent to 836 million francs. Tecentriq revenue more than doubled to 336 million francs.

(Reporting by John Miller)

Source: OANN

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Sociology Professor Offended by “Men Working” Sign Gets Owned on Twitter

She thought she was making a stand for feminism, but ended up becoming a total laughingstock.

From the luxury of her air-conditioned vehicle, Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor of sociology Caitlyn Collins was triggered as she passed a road sign that said “men working,” tweeting a photo of it next to her own salty face.

Collins demanded to know from the workers whether there were any women on the crew.

“What? Oh. I don’t know. I’m just here,” responded one of them.

Collins then suggested that the sign itself was the cause of there being no women in the work crew (naturally, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that women wouldn’t normally choose the profession of operating a pneumatic drill and laying concrete).

“This thread will be great teaching material,” added Collins.

Yeah, if that “teaching material” is solely centered around you being owned, Caitlyn.

The tweet got ratioed and the responses were brutal, with one Twitter user accusing Collins of “harassing the working class”.

Then came the delicious memes.

Imagine being this offended over a road sign.

How do these people even make it through the day without having a nervous breakdown?

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Source: InfoWars

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@DNC blink on immediate #impeachment of @realDonaldTrump & Sanders thinks the #BostonBomber should #Vote #MagaFirstNews w/@PeterBoykin

@DNC blink on immediate #impeachment of @realDonaldTrump & Sanders thinks the #BostonBomber should #Vote #MagaFirstNews w/@PeterBoykin DEMS BLINK ON PURSUING TRUMP IMPEACHMENT -- FOR NOW: Leaders of the House Democrats backed off the idea of immediately launching impeachment proceedings against President Trump in an urgent conference call Monday evening amid a growing rift among the party's rank-and-file members, presidential contenders and committee chairs ... Fox News is told by two ... See More senior sources on the private conference call that even House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters, an anti-Trump firebrand, told fellow Democrats that while she personally favored going forward with impeachment proceedings, she was not pushing for other members to join her. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her leadership team were clear there were no immediate plans to move forward with impeachment, Fox News is also told. Pelosi told fellow Democrats she favors more investigations of Trump to "save our democracy." POST-MUELLER INVESTIGATIONS: If Nancy Pelosi favors more investigations of Trump, she will not be disappointed ... House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., on Monday subpoenaed former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify publicly on May 21, following last week's release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Russia investigation.Nadler described McGahn, who stepped down as White House counsel in October 2018, as "a critical witness to many of the alleged instances of obstruction of justice and other misconduct described in the Special Counsel's report." He has set a May 7 deadline for him to provide documents related to the Mueller investigation. Meanwhile, lawyers for President Trump have sued to block a subpoena issued by members of Congress that sought the business magnate's financial records. OFFICIALS REPEATEDLY WARNED ABOUT GROUP BEHIND SRI LANKA ATTACKS - The purported leader of an Islamic extremist group blamed for an Easter attack in Sri Lanka that killed over 300 people began posting videos online three years ago calling for non-Muslims to be "eliminated," faith leaders said Tuesday ... Much remained unclear about how a little-known group called National Thowfeek Jamaath carried out six large near-simultaneous suicide bombings striking churches and hotels. However, warnings about growing radicalism in this island nation off the coast of India date to at least 2007, while Muslim leaders say their repeated warnings about the group and its leader drew no visible reaction from officials responsible for public security. - Associated Press BERNIE SAYS BOSTON MARATHON BOMBER SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO VOTE: 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday defended his stance for granting voting rights to criminals in prison, including the Boston Marathon bomber and convicted sexual assaulters ... During a CNN town hall on Monday night, a student asked Sanders if his position would support “enfranchising people” like Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who she noted is a “convicted terrorist and murderer,” as well as those “convicted of sexual assault,” whose votes could have a “direct impact on women’s rights.” Sanders first responded by saying he wanted a “vibrant democracy” with “higher voter turnout” and blasted “cowardly Republican governors” who he said were “trying to suppress the vote.” The Vermont senator then argued that the Constitution says “everybody can vote” and that “some people in jail can vote.” NORTH KOREA'S KIM, PUTIN TO MEET: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon visit Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed Tuesday without releasing a set date or location for the meeting ... The meeting may give Kim more leeway in future negotiations with President Trump after their February summit in Vietnam broke down due to disagreement over ridding North Korea of its nuclear arsenal. The Kremlin announced last week that North Korea’s supreme leader will visit Russia “in the second half of April,” but did not elaborate further. OLD TWEET HAUNTS ILHAN OMAR: A resurfaced tweet from Rep. Ilhan Omar saw the Minnesota Democrat claim U.S. forces killed “thousands” of Somalis during the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” mission -- despite multiple analysts concluding the number was much smaller ... In the October 2017 tweet discovered by journalist John Rossomando, Omar was responding to a Twitter user who'd highlighted that more than a dozen U.S. soldiers were killed and another 73 were wounded in the Battle of Mogadishu, saying it was the “worst terrorist attack in Somalia history.” Omar, a Somali refugee who was then a Minnesota state representative, refuted the tweet, insisting that “thousands” of Somalis were killed by American forces. The number of Somali casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu is widely disputed.

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Report: Rep. Tlaib Urges Hunger Strike to Shut Down ICE

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., urged people to join with her in a hunger strike in an attempt to shut down U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), The Washington Free Beacon is reporting.

Her comments came during a fundraiser in Detroit last weekend for the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, the Free Beacon reported. She said Congress is unwilling to abolish ICE.

A video of a woman, reported to be Tlaib, is posted on the Free Beacon website The Free Beacon said the video was captured by America Rising, a conservative group; In the video, the woman is seen addressing an audience and saying: "I want you all to shut them down. We can shut them down. Don't wait for this Congress to act, shut them down.

"I know what they're going to say, they'll go, ‘What do you mean Rashida?' Well I'll tell you. There are some people that are using (a) hunger strike, all these other things, going to the border, and I plan to.”

The Free Beacon said she was also critical of her Democratic colleagues, who she claimed were too “strategic” and reject plans to abolish ICE because they’re “not ready for that now.”

Source: NewsMax Politics

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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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