Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said Friday there's a theory that the New Zealand shooting massacre was actually a false flag attack conducted to boost the political left and the gun control movement.
Speaking on his show, Limbaugh said the accused shooter in the terror attack — which left 49 people dead at two mosques in Christchurch — could have been a gun control advocate rather than the anti-immigrant, white supremacist he claimed to be.
"There's an ongoing theory that the shooter himself may in fact be a leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies, knowing he's gonna get shot in the process," Limbaugh said. "You can't immediately discount this."
After reading portions of the accused shooter's manifesto that referenced U.S. politics, Limbaugh added, "Now, if we're to take this at face value, the guy's objective here — and it probably is multifaceted — but one of his objectives is to continue to roil American society because he understands the leadership role America takes in the world, both culturally, economically, and politically."
The Trump administration is now looking to the courts to completely throw out Obamacare.
In a letter filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, the Justice Department is asking that a lower court’s ruling that the healthcare law is unconstitutional now be affirmed, USA Today is reporting.
U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas had ruled the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, was no longer constitutional because Congress had repealed the requirement that people buy insurance or pay a penalty.
Axios reported that if the DOJ gets its way the ACA’s insurance exchanges would go away and so would its Medicaid expansion. In addition, millions would lose their coverage.
And Axios noted that the Trump administration had initially argued that the courts should only toss out the individual mandate and protections for pre-existing conditions.
Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve School of Law, writing on Reason.com, said the latest DOJ position was “astounding.”
“I was among those who cheered the selection of William Barr as Attorney General and hoped his confirmation would herald the elevation of law over politics within the Justice Department. I am still hopeful, but this latest filing is not a good sign.”
Meanwhile, the DOJ is defending its decision.
"The Department of Justice has determined that the district court's comprehensive opinion came to the correct conclusion and will support it on appeal," Kerri Kupec, spokesperson for the Justice Department, is quoted by CNN.
A survey released Thursday reveals that while the majority of NATO members are content to rely on the American military for defense, they may not be willing to reciprocate and assist the United States.
According to The Charles Koch Institute, the survey was conducted by YouGov and released by both the Charles Koch Institute and RealClearPolitics. The survey polled citizens of the United States, Turkey, France, the United Kingdom and Germany in honor of NATO‘s 70th-anniversary on April 4.
The survey also found NATO members are unsure that military intervention in Afghanistan has been successful.
“People in key European NATO countries seem to want the military benefits of the alliance but aren’t so excited about meeting its most important obligations,” said Vice President of Research and Policy at the Charles Koch Institute, William Ruger. “While they are happy to have the U.S. come to their defense, a striking number of respondents thought it would be bad to be asked to assist the U.S. if it were attacked.”
51 percent of German respondents, 59 percent of French respondents, 66 percent of respondents in the United Kingdom and almost 50 percent of those in Turkey said they believed it was a good thing to be allied with the United States.
However, 51 percent of German respondents and 57 percent of Turkish respondents believe it would be bad if they were asked to assist the United States, and only 27 percent of German respondents, 42 percent of French respondents, and 45 percent United Kingdom respondents said it would be good if they were called upon to assist the United States.
The authoritarian establishment media is now openly reporting anyone who disagrees with them to front organizations of the military industrial complex.
Survey findings also demonstrate that European countries recognize that they should do more to maintain their own defense and that they respondents were unsure that NATO has been successful in Afghanistan.
“This poll shows us that while Americans and Europeans are somewhat favorable when it comes to NATO in the abstract – even if they’re not convinced of its benefits – the more they hear about the costs and possibility of intervention, the less sanguine they are,” said David Craig, editor of RealClearDefense. “Germany, in particular, doesn’t share in the concept of mutual defense, echoing public comments regarding defense spending and their perception that Russia does not pose a direct threat.”
WICHITA, Kan. – A 34-year-old Kansas woman who stole charitable donations meant for an 11-year-old burn victim has been sentenced to a year of probation.
KAKE-TV reports Cinthia Davis, of Wellington, was sentenced Tuesday and ordered restitution to the victim's family. Davis was found guilty of felony theft in January.
Prosecutors allege Davis and her husband set up a GoFundMe account to raise money for a Haysville girl who was burned in September 2015. More than $8,000 was raised in less than a month.
But a Haysville police investigator testified during Davis' trial that all the funds were withdrawn and spent within 60 days after the fundraiser ended.
The girl's mother received only a few hundred dollars.
Davis' husband, Martin Kerr, pleaded guilty to theft and was sentenced to probation last year.
FILE PHOTO: A man stands in front of an electronic board showing the Nikkei stock index outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan, March 25, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-hoon
March 27, 2019
By Hideyuki Sano
TOKYO (Reuters) – Asian shares slipped on Wednesday, giving up their small gains made the previous day, as investors tried to come to terms with a sharp shift in U.S. bond markets and the implications for the world’s top economy.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan fell 0.2 percent while Japan’s Nikkei lost 0.6 percent.
Wall Street’s main indexes tallied solid gains on Tuesday but finished below their session highs in a reflection of the underlying concerns about the economic outlook.
The S&P 500 gained 0.72 percent while the Nasdaq Composite added 0.71 percent.
The 10-year U.S. Treasuries yield inched up to 2.425 percent from Monday’s 15-month low of 2.377 percent, though the yield curve remained inverted, with three-month bills yielding 2.461 percent, more than 10-year bonds.
The inversion spooked many investors as this phenomenon has preceded every U.S. recession over the past 50 years, triggering a dramatic selloff in stock markets across the globe late last week and a stampede into longer-dated U.S. government debt.
“While the markets now got out of the extreme nervousness about the U.S. yield curve, there is no denying that U.S. data has been soft of late, hardly dispelling worries about the outlook,” said Hirokazu Kabeya, chief global strategist at Daiwa Securities.
The silver lining for stock bulls is that in the past it has usually taken many months before the United States had slipped into recession after the curve was first inverted.
Yet the signs from a raft of economic data, including a set of indicators on Tuesday, weren’t encouraging.
Home building fell more than expected in February as construction of single-family homes dropped to near a two-year low while the consumer confidence index by the Conference Board fell unexpectedly.
“We are entering a new phase in markets as the U.S. monetary policy cycle has come to a turning point, from rate hikes to rate cuts,” said Akira Takei, bond fund manager at Asset Management One.
“Not all market participants have changed their mind-set yet. But as time goes by, it will become clear that a rate cut is the real possibility. The curve will be inverted further until the Fed cut rates,” he said.
Many major economies in the world, including China, Europe and Japan, are already slowing down, not helped by uncertainties stemming from trade frictions between the U.S. and China as well as Brexit.
A senior International Monetary Fund official said on Tuesday trade tensions between the U.S. and China have caused huge amounts of economic uncertainty and could cut Asia’s economic growth by 0.9 percentage point.
Investors are left wondering what to expect on Britain’s plan to exit from the European Union, with potential scenarios spanning from a cancellation of Brexit to a no-deal exit.
Prime Minister Theresa May will address her Conservative lawmakers, possibly to set out a timetable for her departure, to win support for her twice-rejected Brexit deal as the parliament prepares to vote on a variety of possible options.
Ahead of the so-called indicative votes, the pound stood little changed at $1.3205.
The euro slipped to a two-week low of $1.1262 as the dollar gained some footing on a rebound in U.S. bond yields. The common currency last fetched $1.1276.
The dollar edged back to 110.50 yen, from Monday’s 1-1/2-month low of 109.70.
Oil prices remained supported by supply curbs by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries plus allies and as Venezuela’s main oil export port and four crude upgraders have been unable to resume operations following a massive power blackout.
U.S. crude futures traded at $59.86 per barrel, down slightly on Wednesday but up 1.4 percent so far this week.
FILE PHOTO: A Canadian dollar coin, commonly known as the "Loonie", is pictured in this illustration picture taken in Toronto January 23, 2015./File Photo
February 25, 2019
By Fergal Smith
TORONTO (Reuters) – The Canadian dollar edged lower against the greenback on Monday, reversing from its highest level in nearly three weeks earlier in the session as oil prices tumbled and investors braced for domestic inflation data due later in the week.
The price of oil, one of Canada’s major exports, sank after U.S. President Donald Trump said OPEC should ease its approach on boosting crude prices, which he said were “getting too high.”
U.S. crude oil futures settled 3.1 percent lower at $55.48 a barrel.
The decline in oil prices and “traders wanting to square up positions” ahead of inflation data triggered the loonie’s pullback, said Darren Richardson, Chief Operating Officer at Richardson International Currency Exchange Inc.
Canada’s inflation report for January is due on Wednesday and fourth-quarter domestic product data is due on Friday, which could help guide expectations for further interest rate hikes from the Bank of Canada.
Money markets expect the Bank of Canada to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 1.75 percent at next week’s interest rate decision, after 125 basis points of tightening by the central bank since July 2017.
At 4:21 p.m. (2121 GMT), the Canadian dollar was trading 0.4 percent lower at 1.3189 to the greenback, or 75.82 U.S. cents. The currency’s weakest level of the session was 1.3196, while it touched its strongest since Feb. 5 at 1.3113.
U.S. stocks rose when Trump said he would delay a planned hike in tariffs on Chinese imports and that the two countries were “very, very close” to a trade deal.
Canada exports many commodities, including oil, so its economy could benefit from an improved outlook for global trade.
Data on Friday from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Reuters calculations showed that speculators cut their bearish bets on the Canadian dollar. As of Feb. 5, net short positions had fallen to 42,037 contracts from 56,390 in the prior week.
Canadian government bond prices edged lower on Monday across much of the yield curve in sympathy with U.S. Treasuries. The two-year fell 1 Canadian cent to yield 1.783 percent and the 10-year declined 5 Canadian cents to yield 1.897 percent.
The gap between Canada’s 2-year yield and its U.S. equivalent widened by 1.7 basis points to a spread of 72.9 basis points in favor of the U.S. bond.
(Reporting by Fergal Smith; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Grant McCool)
FILE PHOTO: Police guard the tents of a temporary camp for Venezuelan refugees in Bogota, Colombia November 19, 2018. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez/File Photo
April 12, 2019
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A refugee fund set up by the World Bank, the United Nations and the Islamic Development Bank on Friday approved a $31.5 million grant for Colombia to aid Venezuelan migrants and refugees.
The Global Concessional Financing Facility grant provides budget support to Colombia as it works to facilitate access to jobs and basic social services to improve the migrants’ lives, the World Bank said. The grant will aid the communities hosting the migrants.
“These non-reimbursable resources will help finance the significant fiscal effort Colombia is making to host and help the Venezuelan migrants in the best way possible.”
The concessional funding is part of a $750 million development policy financing package being prepared by the World Bank to support Colombia’s fiscal sustainability, economic competitiveness and migration challenges.
Specific policy measures include efforts to regularize the status of over 260,000 migrants.
The World Bank estimates that about 3.7 million people have left Venezuela in recent years, and more than 1.2 million migrants and refugees from Venezuela are now living in Colombia.
The influx of migrants and refugees to Colombia has put a severe strain on the country’s economy and social services such as healthcare. The annual cost of hosting the migrants, not including infrastructure and facilities, is currently estimated at around 0.4 percent of GDP, according to the Bank.
“The massive and rapid migration from Venezuela presents an unprecedented humanitarian and development challenge for the region today,” World Bank Latin America vice president Axel van Trotsenburg, said in a statement. “We need to act now to ensure that the migrants from Venezuela and their hosts get the support they need.”
The Global Concessional Financing Facility was launched in 2016 as a response to large numbers of refugees fleeing Syria to Jordan and Lebanon. In two years, the facility has approved $500 million in grants that have unlocked $2.5 billion in concessional financing for development projects aiming to improve the lives of refugees and their host communities.The fund said contributions for the Colombian grant came from Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and Britain.
(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
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.”
The U.S. government say Butina was part of an unofficial influence campaign that overlapped with the 2016 presidential election and targeted conservatives; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from the U.S. district court in Washington.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].”
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.
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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, 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)
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