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Fashion and champagne grace Nigeria polo party

2019 Lagos International Polo Tournament
Spectator Mawuli Gavor chats with Mimi Onaloja and Ini Okojie during the 2019 Lagos International Polo Tournament in Lagos, Nigeria March 17, 2019. Picture taken March 17, 2019. REUTERS/Afolabi Sotunde

March 25, 2019

LAGOS (Reuters) – When polo comes to Lagos, the champagne flows and exuberant fashion colors adorn the green fields.

While most Nigerians would never trade their love of soccer, the commercial capital still hosts the biggest polo tournament in West Africa, with trophies fiercely disputed against a backdrop of glitz and glamour for the upper class.

“Polo has shifted from just the sports to a fashion statement,” said Mudrakat Alabi-Macfoy, wearing an airy white kaftan with a multi-colored floral necklace and head wrap at the Lagos Polo Club.

“For me it is something fun, something playful, something whimsical, something comfortable … a bit of color, a bit of pop,” said Alabi-Macfoy, who works as a lawyer when not watching polo.

In a nation with the world’s highest number of people in extreme poverty, the often-dubbed “sport of kings” is prohibitively expensive for the majority.

First introduced by British colonial servicemen, polo has been played in Nigeria for over a hundred years and nearly all the teams are owned by local multi-millionaires.

“It is an expensive sport because, you know, your horses are like babies,” said Koyinsola Owoeye, who has been playing polo since 2007, seduced by his father’s love of the sport.

A horse can cost about $40,000 – then there is upkeep.

“Maintenance is not easy. Today they can be well, tomorrow they can have, you know, malaria, fever, colic, or even get injured on the field or on their way to the tournament,” Owoeye said.

The 2019 Lagos International Polo Tournament, which wound up on Sunday, fielded 33 teams from Nigeria, Argentina, South Africa, Kenya and the United Kingdom.

(Reporting by Afolabi Sotunde, Nneka Chile and Seun Sanni in Lagos; Writing by Paul Carsten; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

Source: OANN

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Exclusive: J. Crew turns again to debt restructuring lawyers – sources

A J.Crew store is seen in Manhattan, New York
FILE PHOTO: A J.Crew store is seen in Manhattan, New York March 3, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Segar

March 28, 2019

By Mike Spector and Jessica DiNapoli

(Reuters) – J. Crew Group Inc has tapped restructuring lawyers for the second time in as many years to explore options for reworking its debt, as the U.S. clothing chain struggles with falling sales and a dwindling cash pile, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The company’s decision to seek help with its debt once again underscores the persistent business challenges J. Crew faces despite recent turnaround and financial restructuring efforts. A shift to pricier apparel turned off some shoppers, and J. Crew faces competition from e-commerce firms such as Amazon.com Inc that have squeezed an array of traditional retailers.

The preppy fashion retailer in recent weeks enlisted restructuring attorneys at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, the law firm that helped negotiate a previous debt workout for the company and most recently steered department store operator Sears Holdings Corp through bankruptcy proceedings, the sources said.

Weil lawyers with capital markets and mergers and acquisitions expertise are also involved in the discussions with J. Crew, one of the sources said.

J. Crew, which was taken private in 2011 by TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners in a roughly $3 billion leveraged buyout, is also interviewing restructuring specialists at investment banks, the sources said.

In a statement to Reuters on Thursday, the company did not directly address whether it has approached restructuring lawyers, but said it has “been evaluating and executing on opportunities to strengthen J. Crew’s balance sheet” and that its top priority this year is to return its flagship brand to profitability and sustain momentum for its quickly growing Madewell apparel business.

A TPG spokesman declined to comment. Representatives for Leonard Green and Weil did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A bankruptcy filing is not currently on the horizon for J. Crew, which carries a debt load exceeding $1.7 billion, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition they will not be identified because the deliberations are confidential.

The New York-based retailer is in the early stages of exploring options for its debt that could include a refinancing, the sources said. The discussions are aimed at addressing looming debt maturities in 2021, one of the sources added.

The company has not yet approached creditors about a restructuring, though it could eventually do so, one of the sources said. J. Crew has previously mulled hiving off Madewell through a sale or public offering, Reuters has reported.

J. Crew in 2017 reached a deal with creditors, including Blackstone Group LP’s GSO Capital Partners and Anchorage Capital Group, on a debt exchange that roughly cut in half nearly $567 million in bond obligations, and extended their due date by two years.

J. Crew, which has sold clothes once donned by former first lady Michelle Obama, had about $25.7 million in cash as of the beginning of February, down from roughly $107 million a year earlier, and the company has booked financial losses in seven of the last eight quarters, according to securities filings.

(Reporting by Mike Spector and Jessica DiNapoli in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Source: OANN

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Prosecutor: Pastor urged ministers to have sex with teen

Federal prosecutors in Ohio say text messages show that a pastor who's accused of grooming a 14-year-old girl for sex also encouraged two other ministers to have sex with her.

The child sex trafficking trial for Anthony Haynes began Monday in Toledo. He could face up to life in prison if he's convicted.

The two other Toledo-area pastors charged in the investigation have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

Prosecutors say Haynes had promised the girl's mother he'd take care of her, but he instead began having sex with her at his church and a motel until she was 17.

Haynes' attorney told jurors that the allegations are shocking, but there's not enough evidence to prove the trafficking and conspiracy charges he faces.

Source: Fox News National

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Prosecutors: Clear dead serial rapist of 1983 Florida murder

Florida prosecutors want a deceased serial rapist cleared of a 1983 murder, saying DNA evidence shows the killer was actually a man executed for a similar murder.

Broward County prosecutors asked a judge Thursday to dismiss Ronald Stewart's 1985 conviction for the murder of 20-year-old Regina Harrison. They say the real killer was Jack Jones, who was executed in 2017 for a 1995 Arkansas murder. Jones also pleaded guilty to a 1991 Fort Lauderdale murder.

Stewart was arrested in 1983 for serial rapes in the Fort Lauderdale area. He pleaded guilty to three and no contest to second-degree murder for Harrison's slaying and sentenced to 50 years. He died in prison in 2008. Prosecutors say Stewart's serial rape convictions and the evidence behind them stand.

Source: Fox News National

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General Electric sees 2019 profit below estimates

FILE PHOTO: The logo of US conglomerate General Electric is pictured at the company's site of its energy branch in Belfort
FILE PHOTO: The logo of U.S. conglomerate General Electric is pictured at the company's site of its energy branch in Belfort, France, February 5, 2019. REUTERS/Vincent Kessler/File Photo

March 14, 2019

(Reuters) – General Electric Co forecast adjusted earnings of between 50 cents and 60 cents per share in its 2019 outlook on Thursday, below analysts’ expectations of around 70 cents as new Chief Executive Larry Culp plows ahead with asset sales and restructuring.

The U.S. industrial conglomerate, which spooked investors last week by warning of a net cash outflow from its industrial businesses this year, said it expects adjusted industrial free cash flow of between negative $2 billion and flat. https://invent.ge/2HkbYTq

(Reporting by Rachit Vats and Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru; Editing by James Emmanuel)

Source: OANN

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Pelosi slams Trump over attack on Muslim congresswoman using 9/11 images

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) addresses the North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU) 2019 legislative conference in Washington
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) addresses the North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU) 2019 legislative conference in Washington, U.S., April 9, 2019. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

April 13, 2019

By Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) – U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized President Donald Trump on Saturday for a Twitter post that used 9/11 imagery while suggesting Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim, was dismissive of the New York attacks.

“The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence,” Pelosi said in a statement posted on Twitter. “The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.”

On Friday, Trump tweeted a video suggesting that Omar, a Democratic U.S. representative from Minnesota, was dismissive of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The video spliced news footage of 9/11 with a clip from a speech Omar gave last month in which she described the terror attack as “some people did something.”

The Trump tweet included the words “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”

In Omar’s speech, given to a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, she said Muslims had “lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”

Omar said the advocacy group recognized that “some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

Lawmakers from Trump’s Republican party have accused Omar of minimizing the 9/11 attacks, while critics of the president say he took Omar’s words out of context in order to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Source: OANN

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U.S. presidential hopeful Warren proposes new corporate profits tax

FILE PHOTO: Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks to supporters in Memphis
FILE PHOTO: Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks to supporters in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. March 17, 2019. REUTERS/Karen Pulfer Focht/File Photo

April 11, 2019

By Ginger Gibson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is proposing a new 7 percent tax on corporate profits that exceed $100 million, her presidential campaign said on Thursday.

Warren’s proposal would apply the new tax not to the totals companies already report to the IRS, but instead to the profits reported to shareholders – which are frequently much larger given the loopholes, deductions and other accounting differences allowed by the tax code.

Companies would not pay the new tax, which would be in addition to existing corporate taxes that companies already pay, on their first $100 million in profits.

But for each dollar over that threshold, the companies would be subject to a 7 percent tax, Warren outlined in a post on the website Medium and seen by Reuters.

Her campaign estimates about 1,200 companies would be subject to the new tax. It would bring the government an additional $1.05 trillion in new tax revenues over 10 years, according to estimates from economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at the University of California-Berkeley.

Warren hopes to challenge Republican President Donald Trump, who has focused on tax cuts for corporations, which he says have allowed the economy to flourish and lowered the unemployment rate.

Warren is competing in a crowded field of more than 15 Democrats vying for their party’s nomination and has sought to distinguish herself by offering the most numerous and expansive policy proposals.

Warren’s new tax, which she dubs the “Real Corporate Profits Tax,” would account for profits U.S. companies make globally and would also be imposed on foreign companies doing substantial work in the United States.

“This new tax applies to the profits very large American companies report to their investors — with no loopholes or exemptions,” Warren wrote in her proposal.

Warren specifically targets Amazon.com and Occidental Petroleum as two companies she says are not paying enough in corporate taxes and would be forced to pay more under her proposal.

Republicans are likely to criticize her proposal by arguing that it will drive companies currently incorporated in the United States to leave or change domicile to avoid the tax – a practice known as inversion.

Warren’s campaign argues that rules on inversions put in place by the Treasury in 2016 have halted the practice and that she would continue strict enforcement if elected.

(Reporting by Ginger Gibson; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

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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Source: InfoWars

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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