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Strong police presence ahead of march in Nicaragua

Hundreds of police are lining a thoroughfare and manning overpasses in Nicaragua's capital hours before a scheduled opposition march to mark a year since protesters took to the streets to oppose the government of President Daniel Ortega.

A popular mall in the area is also full of police, who are making their presence felt ahead of Wednesday's demonstration. The opposition had sought permission to hold the march, but police denied it.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and foreign governments have urged Ortega to allow people to peacefully demonstrate. Public protests have been effectively banned.

Protests against cuts to social security benefits began April 18, 2018 and were violently repressed by police and Ortega supporters.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says at least 325 people have been killed.

Source: Fox News World

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Armed civilian border group member arrested in New Mexico

Authorities say a New Mexico man belonging to an armed group that has detained Central American families near the U.S.-Mexico border was arrested Saturday on a criminal complaint accusing him of being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition.

The FBI said it arrested 69-year-old Larry Mitchell Hopkins, of Flora Vista, in Sunland Park. New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said Hopkins was a member of the group that had stopped migrants.

FBI spokesman Frank Fisher told The Associated Press that Hopkins was in custody but said no additional information would be released until after Hopkins has an initial appearance Monday in federal court in Las Cruces.

It's not immediately known whether Hopkins has an attorney who could comment on the allegations.

Source: Fox News National

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Iran says reaches understanding with Iraq to develop two oilfields

FILE PHOTO: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani shake hands with Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi during a news conference in Tehran
FILE PHOTO: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani shake hands with Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi during a news conference in Tehran, Iran, April 6, 2019. Official Iranian President website/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo

April 7, 2019

GENEVA (Reuters) – Iran and Iraq have reached an understanding about developing two oilfields on their mutual border, Iran’s oil minister was quoted saying on Sunday, a day after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for increased trade between the two countries.

The focus of the understanding is the development of the Naft Shahr and Khorramshahr oilfields, Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said according to a report on Iran’s oil ministry website on Sunday, without giving any details of the plan.

Rouhani called on Saturday for Iran and Iraq to expand their gas, electricity and oil dealings and boost bilateral trade to $20 billion, state TV reported, despite difficulties caused by U.S. sanctions against Tehran.

“We hope that our plans to expand trade volume to $20 billion will be realized within the next few months or years,” Rouhani said, after a meeting with visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, in remarks carried by state television.

Iranian media reports have put the current level of trade at about $12 billion.

Zanganeh had in February criticized Iraq for not agreeing to develop shared oilfields because of sanctions fears, according to comments published by the oil ministry’s news site SHANA.

However the energy industries in the two countries have close links and Iraq relies heavily on Iranian gas to feed its power stations.

Iraq imports roughly 1.5 billion standard cubic feet of gas per day from Iran via pipelines in the south and east of the country. Zanganeh noted Iraq owes Iran approximately $1 billion for gas supplied in the past. 

“Given the lack of development in the petrochemicals and gas industries in Iraq, there is a bright perspective for cooperation between the two countries,” Zanganeh said, again without giving any further details.

There was no immediate comment from the Iraqi oil ministry on Sunday about the oilfields understanding.

After a trip to Iraq last month by Rouhani and Zanganeh, Iran had agreed to help Iraq with technical and engineering services in the oil sector.

Iran also agreed to help with the development of mutual fields, rebuilding old refineries, and helping build a network for gas delivery, Amir Hossein Zamaninia, Iran’s deputy oil minister for trade and international affairs, said on Sunday, according to SHANA, the new site of the Iranian oil ministry.

U.S President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions on Iran’s energy exports in November, citing its nuclear program and meddling in the Middle East, but has granted waivers to several buyers to meet consumer energy needs.

In March the United States granted Iraq a 90-day waiver exempting it from sanctions on buying energy from Iran.

(Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh; Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Editing by David Holmes)

Source: OANN

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Historic floods in the Midwest have farmers worried about their future

Dustin Sheldon, a fifth-generation grain and soybean farmer, watched in horror as the floods that devastated the Midwest began to recede and he could assess the damage to his crops.

He said the record-breaking floods caused about $1 million in losses for his family farm.

“We figured that there is roughly $7 million worth of grain sitting in these grain bins here just in our county alone that is either destroyed or inaccessible right now that we won’t even be able to get to or sell,” he said. “Financially,  there’s a lot of farmers that can’t come back from that and they may be out of business.”

An intense "bomb cycle" caused massive flooding in states like Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, damaging homes and causing extensive damage to crops that feed the country. The pain is particularly felt among farmers whose livelihood depend on crop sales. Now that land is drying up, many are starting to assess how the damage will impact their bottom-lines.

Sheldon said that April marks a time when farmers should be fertilizing their lands to prepare for the upcoming crop season. But farmers now have to wait until the water recedes to see what they have left to survive on ahead of the 2019 farming season.

“Obviously right now, we’re a ways from being able to do that. Our 2019 crop is looking very discouraging -- [and that's] if we’ll even be able to get a crop in the ground,” said Sheldon.                                                                                         

Across the country, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri governors have all declared a state of emergency in response to the historic floods.

In Nebraska, Gov. Pete Ricketts stated his state alone had sustained nearly $1.4 billion dollars in losses and damages.  Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds estimates $1.6 billion in damages.

While farmers have contingency plans in place, including insurance for crops on the ground, Sheldon said farmers will not receive aid or funding for the stored crops and livestock during the floods.

And flooded fields aren’t the only problem facing farmers. Collapsed roads and infrastructure will slow down efforts to repair infrastructure crucial to get the area back up and running.

“It can be two years before we see an income again,” Sheldon stated. “Our levy system is completely destroyed.  It’s going to be a rebuild and our core engineers department is telling us that it could take two years to do that.”

Ernie Goss, a professor of economics at Creighton University, said the damage caused by the floods is not limited to those in the agriculture sector.

Consumers nationwide could feel the impact too.

“I like to say what happens on the farm does not stay on the farm. It ripples throughout the region and, in this case, we’re going to see it ripple throughout the nation," Goss stated. "We are going to see an increase in food across the United States. Just how much will still have to be determined.”

A recent study conducted by Professor Goss in Creighton University Mid-America Business Conditions Index shows that 22 percent of supply managers reported their firm was experiencing negative impacts from recent floods.

As for Sheldon, he is hoping that Congress can come to an agreement to pass a disaster relief bill so farmers can get back to their livelihood.

The most recent measure was struck down in the Senate.

“You know, if we have a disaster somewhere else it seems like the money comes immediately for disaster aid," Sheldon said, "but there are people who are paying mortgages with 10 feet of water inside their houses while living somewhere else.”

Source: Fox News National

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Global economic slowdown might trigger new financial crisis: Italy’s finance minister

Italian Economy Minister Tria holds a news conference after a Euro zone finance ministers meeting in Brussels
Italian Economy Minister Giovanni Tria holds a news conference after a Euro zone finance ministers meeting in Brussels, Belgium November 19, 2018. REUTERS/Eric Vidal

March 27, 2019

MILAN (Reuters) – Italy’s Economy Minister Giovanni Tria said on Wednesday he feared the ongoing economic slowdown at a global level could trigger a new financial crisis.

“Everybody fears a financial crisis can translate into a global economic crisis […] My opinion is … that the economic slowdown, especially if it were to worsen, could lead to a global financial crisis,” Tria said at an event in China.

(Writing by Alessia Pe, editing by Silvia Aloisi)

Source: OANN

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India says space debris from anti-satellite test to ‘vanish’ in 45 days

A Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) Interceptor takes off to hit one of India's satellites in the first such test, from the Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Island, in the eastern state of Odisha
A Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) Interceptor takes off to hit one of India's satellites in the first such test, from the Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Island, in the eastern state of Odisha, India, March 27, 2019. Picture taken March 27, 2019. India's Press Information Bureau/Handout via REUTERS

March 28, 2019

By Sanjeev Miglani

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India expects space debris from its anti-satellite weapons launch to burn out in less than 45 days, its top defense scientist said on Thursday, seeking to allay global concern about fragments hitting objects.

The comments came a day after India said it used an indigenously developed ballistic missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites at a height of 300 km (186 miles), in a test aimed at boosting its defenses in space.

Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years.

G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation, said a low-altitude military satellite was picked for the test, to reduce the risk of debris left in space.

“That’s why we did it at lower altitude, it will vanish in no time,” he told Reuters in an interview. “The debris is moving right now. How much debris, we are trying to work out, but our calculations are it should be dying down within 45 days.”

Few satellites operate at the altitude of 300 km, from which experts say the collision debris will fall back to earth, burning up in the atmosphere in a matter of weeks, instead of posing a threat to other satellites.

In 2007, China destroyed a satellite in a polar orbit, creating the largest orbital debris cloud in history, with more than 3,000 objects, according to the Secure World Foundation.

Because the impact altitude exceeded 800 km (500 miles), many of the resulting scraps stayed in orbit. “Some of it could still be there,” Reddy said, adding that India had been much more careful in conducting its test.

In Florida, on a visit to the U.S. military’s Southern Command, acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan warned any nations contemplating similar anti-satellite weapons tests that they risked making a “mess” in space from debris.

The U.S. military’s Strategic Command was tracking more than 250 pieces of debris from India’s missile test and would issue “close-approach notifications as required until the debris enters the Earth’s atmosphere,” Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Dave Eastburn said.

Reddy identified the military satellite shot down as Microsat R, weighing about 750 kg (1,653 lb) and launched on Jan. 24. by the Indian Space Research Organisation for the purpose of the test.

A week after launch, it was moved into a different orbit in preparation for the test.

“The technology has been completely proven, we hit it with centimeters of accuracy, probably less than 10 cm,” Reddy said.

India’s test of the anti-satellite weapon from an island off its eastern coast broke a lull since the United States used a ship-launched SM-3 missile to destroy a defunct spy satellite in Operation Burnt Frost in 2008.

The Union of Concerned Scientists said nearly 2,000 orbiting satellites provide key benefits to people around the world, and India’s launch showed more countries were seeking the capabilities that put satellites at risk.

“Destroying satellites…can have ripple effects, producing dangerous clouds of debris that could stay in orbit for decades or centuries, disabling or destroying any satellites they collide with,” one of its scientists, Laura Grego, said in a statement.

(Reporting by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Source: OANN

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UCLA head soccer coach charged in admissions fraud scandal resigns

A sign is pictured on the grounds of University of Southern California in Los Angeles
FILE PHOTO: A sign is pictured on the grounds of University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, U.S., March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

March 22, 2019

(Reuters) – University of Southern California Los Angeles’ head men’s soccer coach, Jorge Salcedo, who is among those charged in the biggest admissions fraud scheme uncovered in the United States, resigned his post Thursday, school officials told several media outlets including the New York Post.

Salcedo was one of nine current or former college coaches, as well as an associate athletic director, who were charged by federal prosecutors in Boston on March 12 in connection with the fraud scheme that has captured national attention.

According to court documents, Salcedo was among school officials who are accused of accepting bribes in exchange for designating admissions candidates as recruited athletes to increase their chances of gaining acceptance at elite universities.

UCLA officials placed Salcedo on leave on last week after learning he was charged with accepting up to $200,000 for helping two students gain admission by posing as competitive soccer players.

Neither a UCLA spokesman nor a representative for Salcedo were immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Rich McKay, Editing by William Maclean)

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].”

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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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