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Argentina’s new trillion-peso risk: mounting ‘Leliq’ debt

FILE PHOTO: A man shows Argentine pesos outside a bank in Buenos Aires' financial district
FILE PHOTO: A man shows Argentine pesos outside a bank in Buenos Aires' financial district, Argentina August 30, 2018. Picture taken August 30, 2018. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci

March 13, 2019

By Gabriel Burin

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Argentina has a new debt worry. The country’s pile of short-term “Leliq” notes has broken through 1 trillion pesos (around $24 billion), a potential strain on the central bank’s coffers and a fresh headache for the government in an election year.

The Leliq debt, denominated in pesos and auctioned daily to mostly domestic banks, helps the central bank mop up funds in the market to bolster a weak currency and bring down stubborn inflation. But with sky-high interest rates it is also raising concerns that it could become unsustainable.

The spike in the short-term government debt instrument is significant in a country where a tumbling peso, stalling growth and problems repaying debt last year led to an emergency $56 billion deal with the International Monetary Fund.

“If investors start thinking that this is a problem, then it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Carlos de Sousa, senior Latin America economist at Oxford Economics.

“Banks could be discouraged from holding Leliqs, the interest will go up further, and that may end up in the BCRA (central bank) having to rethink its monetary policy framework once again.”

A central bank spokesman said when inflation was taken into account the rise in Leliq volumes was “considerably more moderate.” Monthly inflation in January was 2.9 percent and is expected to rise around 32 percent this year.

The central bank auctioned around 200 billion pesos in Leliq notes on Wednesday at a four-month high average interest rate of 63.328 percent, with net Leliq debt rising above the trillion peso mark for the first time this week, according to official bank data and traders.

(GRAPHIC: Argentina’s trillion-peso Leliq debt – https://tmsnrt.rs/2UEgejH)

“SNOWBALL EFFECT”

In theory, if rates remained elevated, that could put the government on the line for annual interest of around 600 billion pesos or more, considering compound interest. Most analysts expect rates to drop, though they have spiked again recently.

Rates peaked at over 70 percent in October before easing to just above 40 percent last month as economic fears abated. However, higher-than-expected inflation and renewed fears about the peso have forced rates back up sharply over the last month.

The issue would arise if high rates created a “snowball” effect with Leliq notes, some analysts said, as the central bank issued more of the instrument to repay the debt. Leliqs set the benchmark lending rate and are a main tool to control inflation.

“The face value of Leliqs is really high now so we need to watch it closely,” said Juan Lezica, a Buenos Aires-based economist with consultancy ACM. “It starts to get a bit dangerous if it continues to grow at this rate.”

Rating agency Moody’s said on Wednesday the high rates were negative for the country’s banks because they increased loan delinquencies and stymied economic activity.

The sharp ramp-up of high-interest Leliq debt underscores how Argentina’s central bank is having to fire on all cylinders to defend the peso, which lost half its value against the dollar last year, and draw down inflation running at nearly 50 percent.

High-interest peso debt encourages banks to keep their money in the currency, rather than moving it into safer dollars – a trend which last year pummeled the peso.

Argentine President Mauricio Macri also wants to avoid a flight from the peso at all costs, which would destabilize an already fragile economic situation and derail his plans to seek re-election when the country heads to the polls in October.

Eric Ritondale, Buenos Aires-based economist at consultancy Econviews, said if markets remained stable then the central bank should be able to turn over the rising Leliq debt, but that rates – up twenty points in the last month – were the issue.

“The amount (of Leliq) itself doesn’t worry me so much,” he said. “What worries me is that rates have gained so much again after their lows earlier this year.”

($1 = 41.5000 Argentine pesos)

(Reporting by Gabriel Burin; Additional reporting by Jorge Otoala; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O’Brien)

Source: OANN

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Pompeo: sees joint action with NATO allies next week on Ukraine

FILE PHOTO - Pompeo testifies in House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing
FILE PHOTO - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testifies at a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the State Department's budget request for 2020 in Washington D.C., U.S. March 27, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott

March 27, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he hoped to announce with NATO allies visiting Washington next week additional steps to push back on Russia over its aggression in Ukraine.

“Next week I am hopeful … I will be able to announce another series of actions that we will jointly take together,” Pompeo told a House of Representatives hearing. He also acknowledged that Washington could have done more to address Moscow’s activity in Ukraine.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Susan Thomas)

Source: OANN

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The Latest: Police standoff on Atlanta-area freeway ends

The Latest on a freeway standoff outside Atlanta (all times local):

11:50 a.m.

Video from a TV news helicopter showed police pulling a man from a car — the apparent end to a lengthy standoff that played out in the middle of an Atlanta freeway.

More than a dozen police officers with guns drawn had filled four lanes of I-75 near Atlanta, bringing Friday morning traffic to a standstill.

Marietta police said an armed driver had stopped on the freeway and wasn't cooperating with officers. Police had followed the vehicle to I-75 since it matched the description from an armed robbery nearby.

Police said all southbound lanes of Interstate 75 were shut down as they tried to negotiate with the man by phone.

News photos showed that the man was alive as he was carried away by police. No injuries have been reported.

___

10:55 a.m.

More than a dozen police cars and officers standing outside with their guns drawn filled four lanes of a freeway near Atlanta, bringing traffic to a standstill as they confronted an armed motorist.

Marietta police said in a brief statement that a driver stopped on the freeway was armed and not cooperating with police Friday morning.

The southbound lanes of Interstate 75 were shut down just northwest of Atlanta. Police described the motorist as a "non-compliant driver."

Few other details were immediately available, and no injuries were immediately reported.

Traffic was backed up for miles. The standoff comes on a particularly busy day on Atlanta highways as people are traveling through the city on their way to spring break destinations.

The situation was unfolding near SunTrust Park, the home of the Atlanta Braves, but no game was planned Friday.

Source: Fox News National

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Aviation World Faces a Moment of Reckoning

Aviation World Faces a Moment of Reckoning

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File

It was a moment the aviation world had been waiting for since a second deadly crash grounded the 737 MAX fleet: Boeing gathered hundreds of pilots, airline executives, and regulators to unveil a fix that would return the jetliner to the sky.

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Russia Probe Was a Disinformation Operation From the Start

Russia Probe Was a Disinformation Operation From the Start

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

It will take weeks for the elite pundit class to unravel all the possible implications and subtexts embedded in Robert Mueller's final report on the charge that Donald Trump and his team colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election. The right claims that the report exonerates Trump fully, while the left contends there are ...

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Peter King: Russia probe was a ‘coordinated effort’ to investigate Trump

The Russia probe was “a coordinated effort by certain people at the top level of the government” to go after President Trump that needs to be examined, Rep. Peter King said Friday.

A day after the release of the redacted Muller report, the Long Island Republican told Fox News' “America’s Newsroom” Friday that he questions why the investigation was launched in the first place.

King said as a member of the House Intelligence Committee which conducted its own probe into Russia meddling during the 2016 presidential election, he never saw any evidence “at all” of collusion.

“To launch a law enforcement investigation--they called it counter-intelligence--but it was a law enforcement investigation with wiretaps and everything else based on the flimsiest of evidence,” King said of the FBI's Russia probe.

TRUMP RAILS AGAINST ASSOCIATES WHO SPOKE TO MUELLER, CALLS CLAIMS ‘TOTAL BULL---T’

He believes that for people like former FBI director James Comey and former Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, the investigation was just an excuse to probe Trump.

“This was to me a coordinated effort by certain people at top levels of the government and that should be investigated to find out how this came about,” King said.

“I would say the same thing if it was Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sander or anybody else,” he added.

King said it remains murky even now as to when the Russia probe began.

MUELLER REPORT IGNITES NEW DEM BATTLE OVER IMPEACHMENT

Even as Trump claimed vindication with the release of the Mueller report, King said there are certain things Muller left out of his 440-page document.

“He has in there that Russia wanted Trump to win,” King said. “From all that I’ve seen they never thought Donald Trump was going to win."

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He added, “What they wanted to do was damaged Hillary Clinton because they thought she was going to win and they wanted to weaken her if she was the president.”

Source: Fox News Politics

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Latvia pledges faster money laundering reform as pressure builds

FILE PHOTO: Swedbank signs are seen on the bank's Latvian head office in Riga
FILE PHOTO: Swedbank signs are seen on the bank's Latvian head office in Riga, Latvia, April 9, 2019. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins/File Photo

April 11, 2019

By John O’Donnell and Gederts Gelzis

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Latvia’s prime minister has promised to accelerate an overhaul of the banking sector as fears grow that money laundering scandals could single the country out as high risk, prompting Swedish lenders to leave and isolating the Baltic state.

In an interview with Reuters, Krisjanis Karins said he would take earlier reforms a step further and change rules on management appointments at the country’s banking regulator, while granting it the power to close banks with “dirty money”.

“We are giving out a signal to those individuals or companies looking for a place to launder money,” said Karins, who took over as prime minister in January. “We are saying we are not open for business.”

Early last year, U.S. authorities accused Latvia’s third biggest bank, ABLV, of money laundering and breaking sanctions on North Korea, prompting its closure and triggering the country’s worst financial crisis in a decade.

Latvia now faces a review by international money-laundering standards watchdog Moneyval in coming months, which some officials fear could label the country as risky, alongside the likes of Serbia and Pakistan.

The body issued a highly critical assessment of Latvia last year, citing corruption, vulnerability to international organized crime and exposure to corruption in neighboring former soviet states.

Acknowledging the threat of what officials call grey-listing, Karins said the country was serious about tackling corruption and financial crime, appealing directly to Swedish banks not to lose faith.

Swedbank has been drawn into a Baltic money laundering scandal that has wiped billions of euros off its market value, prompting fears among some Latvian officials that it could follow Danish rival Danske in leaving the area.

“These banks are important to our region. They are important to our financial stability,” Karins said.

“My message to them is very simple. They can rest assured that we are creating a very resilient system.”

A spokesman for Swedbank said that it would “continue to be the bank for the many households and corporates” in Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

SEB Chairman Marcus Wallenberg recently said the region would remain an “important part” of future strategy.

GREY MONEY

Latvia’s finance minister, Janis Reirs, who visited Washington this week to outline his country’s progress to top U.S. officials, said investigating and prosecuting of financial crime would improve.

He met Marshall Billingslea, who leads the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the U.S. Treasury, according to officials.

“This grey money is one of the main feeding sources for corruption,” Reirs told Reuters.

The stakes are high for one of Europe’s poorest countries. While Latvia’s economy is growing, Morten Hansen, of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, said any grey-listing could hit its credit rating, risking a recession.

Nonetheless, the push by the new government, built on a fragile coalition of five parties, to reinvigorate reforms faces obstacles, including open divisions between lawmakers and the institutions tasked with policing banks.

Peters Putnins, who heads the Financial and Capital Market Commission, which supervises banks, said the government’s reforms amounted to political interference in his work and were a veiled attempt to oust him.

“This is reorganization … to change the … staff of the supervisory board of the commission,” he told Reuters. “The banking supervision must be independent. If this is not political interference, what is this?”

Since Latvia secured independence from Russia in 1991, more than a dozen of its banks have promoted themselves as a gateway to Western markets for clients in former Soviet states, promising Swiss-style secrecy.

That policy has now been abandoned under pressure from the U.S. and despite predictions by Latvian officials a year ago that many would close, the banks are still open.

Karins said the sector has been cleaned up but changing its approach to banking is still a difficult balancing act for Latvia.

Washington is an important military ally for the former Soviet-ruled state of 2 million people on the EU’s eastern flank. It also has close historical and trade ties with Russia.

Karins appealed for a joint European effort to tackle money laundering, criticizing the “patchwork” of laws around the region. “It’s a European problem,” he said. “Banks in this region have been used … as transit runs.”

(Writing By John O’Donnell; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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