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FCA sets annual target compensation for CEO Manley of $14 million: filing

FILE PHOTO: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) CEO Mike Manley arrives at the memorial service held in honor of former CEO Sergio Marchionne in Turin
FILE PHOTO: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) CEO Mike Manley arrives at the memorial service held in honor of former CEO Sergio Marchionne in Turin, Italy, September 14, 2018. REUTERS/Massimo Pinca/File Photo

February 22, 2019

DETROIT (Reuters) – Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV (FCA) has set an annual compensation target for Chief Executive Officer Mike Manley consisting of pay, cash and equity bonuses of $14 million, the automaker said in a regulatory filing on Friday.

Manley took over as the head of FCA last July after the abrupt departure of his predecessor Sergio Marchionne. The company paid its new CEO 600,442 euros ($680,240) for 2018 and he will receive a bonus for 2018 of $367,000 to be paid this year.

(Reporting By Nick Carey)

Source: OANN

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Gingrich: Risks High If US Doesn't Win 5G Race

The race for 5G — the next generation of broadband connection — is currently being won by China, and that could ultimately imperil America, according to commentator Newt Gingrich.

In his latest podcast, and in a commentary for Fox News, the former GOP House Speaker warns “If America does not get its act together, catch up, and do what it takes to win, we are very likely going to end up in a Chinese-dominated world.”

According to Gingrich, the country that wins the 5G technology race “will dominate economically, militarily, and in sheer knowledge.“

“This next generation technology will vastly expand our connectivity and dramatically change our everyday lives,” he writes. “It is so powerful and offers so many opportunities and potential threats, it will fundamentally change the world in which we live.”

The “full deployment” of 5G is destined to be “the backbone of autonomous manufacturing, smart homes, self-driving cars, real-time virtual reality” and other “life-changing technologies,” Gingrich writes.

And that means a multitude of risks.

“If the global system that is built isn’t fully secure, the data that flows through the system will be up for grabs,” he writes, allowing “bad actors” — and governments — “to know who you call, what’s in your bank account, what’s in your health records, and where you physically are at all times.”

“Consider how radically different our lives would be if a totalitarian dictatorship had that kind of access – and control – on our economy, national security, and our daily lives,” he writes.

Related Stories:

Source: NewsMax America

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Dershowitz praises Barr’s testimony before Congress, says he’s working hard to ‘depoliticize’ DOJ

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Fox News Wednesday that Attorney General William Barr struck the right chord and "depoliticized" the Mueller report during his testimony before Congress on Tuesday.

"He very much wants to depoliticize the Department of Justice and bring it back to its origins as a non-partisan law enforcement agency," Dershowitz said. "He wants to have credibility. He wants to produce the report according to the law. He's not going to be pressured by the president, he's not going to be pressured by the Democrats, he's not going to be pressured by the Republicans. He's going to do it the right way. That's the projected image that he wants to convey."

Barr told lawmakers he expects to release his redacted version of the special counsel's Trump-Russia report within a week. Democrats hammered him for hours on the report, criticized his handling of the document and demanded it be turned over without redactions.

SEAN HANNITY: BARR WILL HOLD THE DEEP STATE ACTORS ACCOUNTABLE AND CRIMINAL INDICTMENTS ARE COMING

Barr also told lawmakers that "the work of the special counsel was not a mystery to the people at the Department of Justice."

He added that "there was some inkling into the thinking of the special counsel," referring to an early March meeting with Mueller at the DOJ where the special counsel laid out his preliminary conclusions.

BARR REVEALS HE IS REVIEWING 'CONDUCT' OF FBI'S ORIGINAL RUSSIA PROBE

Dershowitz says it was important for Barr to say that because "you don't want to fall into the situation where you have to make an important decision within 48 hours without having some advance knowledge."

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

"I'm sure that Barr knew from Mueller what the thrust of the report was going to be," he said. "He had time to think about it, talk to his aides about it and time to make the kind of decision the attorney general is supposed to make. ...The special counsel works for the attorney general. It's the attorney general who is ultimately responsible for deciding how much of the report to release, how to act on it."

Source: Fox News Politics

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US, Russia divided on Venezuela after talks in Rome

Russia and the United States remain split on how to resolve the crisis in Venezuela, officials from both powers said Tuesday after talks in Rome.

Elliott Abrams, the Trump administration's special envoy to Venezuela, met Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov to discuss the situation in the Latin American country.

"We did not come to a meeting of the minds, but the talks were positive in the sense that I think both sides emerged with a better understanding of the other's views," Abrams told reporters after the meeting at a luxury hotel in Rome.

He said it's "perfectly plausible" that the two sides meet again but no date was set.

Russia backs Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and has accused Washington of meddling in the country's affairs by pressing him to step down and hand over power to opposition leader Juan Guaido.

Speaking to Russian media, Ryabkov emphasized the need for dialogue with the U.S. but warned Washington against military intervention.

President Donald Trump has said "all options are on the table" regarding Venezuela, which Russia interprets as a refusal to exclude military force, Ryabkov said.

"We have warned the U.S. against that reckless approach," Ryabkov said in remarks that were carried by the state Tass and RIA Novosti news agencies.

Abrams insisted the U.S. will continue to keep its options open but said it has chosen the path of putting political, financial and diplomatic pressure on Maduro's regime.

Earlier, Abrams met government officials from Italy — one of four European Union countries that have not backed Guaido as Venezuela's interim president — and paid a visit to the Vatican. He noted that the Catholic Church enjoys respect and credibility in Venezuela but said it's unclear what role if any the Vatican could play in its political crisis.

Pope Francis has reportedly written to Maduro indicating conditions aren't ripe for the Vatican to step in and help mediate.

___

Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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Foxconn chairman Gou says he aims to step down in coming months

FILE PHOTO: Terry Gou, founder and chairman of Foxconn, attends a forum on industrial internet at the fifth WIC in Wuzhen
FILE PHOTO: Terry Gou, founder and chairman of Foxconn, attends a forum on industrial internet at the fifth World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, China, November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee

April 15, 2019

TAIPEI (Reuters) – The chairman of Taiwan’s Foxconn, assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, told Reuters on Monday he plans to step down in the coming months, saying he wants to pave the way for younger talent to move up the ranks of the company.

Terry Gou, speaking on the sidelines of an event in Taipei, said that while he planned to step down as chairman, he hoped to remain involved in strategic decisions regarding the company’s business.

He said his plans would be discussed with the board of Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd.

(Reporting By Yimou Lee; Writing by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Source: OANN

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Bodycam footage of officer-involved shooting near Yale University released by police

Connecticut State Police on Tuesday released body camera footage of the officer-involved shooting near Yale University that sparked a week of protests.

The video, captured by Hamden Police Officer Devin Eaton’s body camera, started after Eaton and Yale University Officer Terrance Pollock stopped a red Honda Civic just after 4:00 a.m. on April 16 about a mile from the Yale campus, Fox 61 reported.

Police said they had received a 911 call about a possible armed robbery at a gas station. While investigating, the officers came across the Honda, which they believed to be involved.

BODY CAM FOOTAGE SHOWS OFFICERS ATTEMPTING TO SAVE JUSTINE DAMOND AFTER SHE WAS SHOT BY OFFICER

The footage showed Eaton approaching the vehicle from behind. When the driver opened the door and started to get out, Eaton ran around to the passenger side and fired his weapon. Eaton then took shelter behind another vehicle and row of garbage cans and called in “shots fired.”

The driver, Paul Witherspoon III, 21, was not injured in the incident. His girlfriend, Stephanie Washington, 22, was sitting in the passenger’s seat and received injuries that were not life-threatening, according to the New Haven Register.

In addition to the body cam footage, Connecticut State Police also released a 911 call, police dispatch audio and two angles of surveillance footage.

CALIFORNIA POLICE RELEASE BODYCAM FOOTAGE OF FATAL SHOOTING OF RAPPER

Connecticut State Police Commissioner James Rovella said Eaton fired 13 times and Pollock fired three times. He also said that Pollock was hit with a "projectile" from Eaton during the incident.

Rovella said police have interviewed Witherspoon but would not yet release that information.

Michael Dolan, an attorney for Witherspoon, said his client maintains that he never had a gun and never tried to rob anyone.

BODYCAM FOOTAGE SHOWS POLICE RESCUE OF DOG HANGING BY BECK OVER BALCONY: REPORT

In the days since the shooting, local leaders, activists, and community members have taken to the streets and the Yale campus to protest and call for police accountability.

Witherspoon's uncle, Rodney Williams, has called for the officers involved in the shooting to be fired.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

"There is no city in this country that will allow officers to do that. I'm sure eventually they will be fired," Williams told CNN. "No administrative leave, you're out of here, and you can sue me for wrongful termination, but you should be fired."

Yale confirmed that Pollock, a 16-year veteran of the department, has been placed on leave until the investigation is completed. The Hamden Police Department said Eaton is also on leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

Source: Fox News National

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Pakistan dismisses Indian terror dossier as mostly ‘social media content’

Indian soldiers examine the debris after an explosion in Lethpora in south Kashmir's Pulwama district
Indian soldiers examine the debris after an explosion in Lethpora in south Kashmir's Pulwama district February 14, 2019. REUTERS/Younis Khaliq

March 28, 2019

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Pakistan on Thursday dismissed a dossier handed over by India in the wake of a suicide attack that nearly sparked a full-blown conflict earlier this month, saying the allegation that Pakistani groups were involved was unsubstantiated.

At least 40 Indian security personnel were killed when a suicide bomber from Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e- Mohammad (JeM) attacked a convoy on Feb. 14, at Pulwama, a town in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Jaish later claimed responsibility for the attack carried out by a young Muslim man from Pulwama. Pakistan maintains that the insurgency in the disputed region is being fought by Muslim separatists from India’s side of Kashmir.

Following the Pulwama attack, both countries carried out aerial bombings missions on each other’s soil and their warplanes also fought a brief dogfight over Kashmir’s skies.

Tensions cooled when global powers intervened to prevent a full-scale conflict between the nuclear armed neighbors and Pakistan handed back a captured Indian pilot.

India, which alleges Islamabad had a hand in the suicide bombing, last month presented what it said was a dossier of evidence about the Pulwama attack, and alleged links to Pakistan.

Pakistan has consistently denied playing any role. And after briefing foreign diplomats in Islamabad, Pakistan’s foreign ministry issued a statement asserting that most of India’s dossier was based on “social media content”.

It said the Indian dossier listed 90 individuals suspected of belonging to banned organizations with militant links and 22 locations of alleged militant training camps.

“While 54 detained individuals are being investigated, no details linking them to Pulwama have been found so far,” said the ministry, which handed the findings to India on Wednesday.

“Similarly, the 22 pin locations shared by India have been examined. No such camps exist.”

Pakistan said it was willing to allow visits to the locations of alleged training camps if there was any request, but it would need more documents and additional information from India to continue its investigation.

India said it hit a JeM militant training camp on Feb. 26 during an aerial bombing mission inside Pakistan though Islamabad denied the existence of the camp, and said the Indian raid had hit a largely empty hillside.

Local villagers from the area told Reuters that there was a JeM-run seminary nearby but it was unclear whether it was occupied. They also said they had seen no signs of any casualties from the Indian raid.

Earlier this month, Pakistan announced a crackdown against militant groups based on its soil, but India remains skeptical as it believes Pakistan’s security establishment views these proscribed groups as strategic assets.

Pakistan’s previous offers to investigate attacks carried out by anti-India militants have yielded scant results.

(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

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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