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WashPost: Grandparents Raising Kids Amid Opioid Epidemic

Grandparents are more and more forced into the role of raising their children's children amid the latest drug epidemic tied to opioids, particularly for low-income white Americans, census data suggests, according to The Washington Post.

"As the middle generation has been hollowed out by the abuse of opioids and other substances, the oldest generation has become increasingly responsible for their grandkids, experts say," the Post's Andrew Van Dam wrote.

"It's a responsibility that many didn't expect and weren't prepared for. Retired folks find themselves trading their sedans for minivans, moving out of their adult-only communities and searching for work to cover the expenses that come with raising a child."

With the shear number of kids who need care as their parents either die from drug addiction, are jailed, or need rehab, the foster care system in communities are flooded, forcing areas to seek out extended family to take over care, sometimes without notice, according to the report.

"Unlike traditional foster parents who typically plan and go through a series of trainings, and plan for months or years to take on the role of caring for an additional child, grandparents and other relatives typically step into the role of raising children with little to no warning," Generations United deputy executive director Jaia Lent told the post. "They often get a call in the middle of the night, saying, 'Pick up your grandchild, or they'll go into foster care.'"

According to Generations United, about 95 percent of caregiving relatives work outside the foster care system and often lack financial means and support to meet needs, per the report.

Source: NewsMax America

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Security Council members report no progress on Yemen deal

Security Council members say U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths is reporting no progress in getting the warring parties in Yemen to withdraw their forces from the key port of Hodeida and two smaller ports as called for in an agreement they signed in December.

France's Foreign Minister Francois Delattre, the current council president, told reporters after Wednesday's closed-door meeting that his report was "not good."

Belgium's U.N. Ambassador Marc Pecsteen de Buytswerve was blunter, telling reporters: "At this point of time there is no progress so the council might do something."

Britain's U.N. Ambassador Karen Pierce said council members always said the agreement reached in Stockholm "is fragile — and this is proof that it is fragile." But she added: "I wouldn't say it was in more trouble than we expected."

Source: Fox News World

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Michigan boy calls 911 to place McDonald’s order and police deliver

A Michigan boy with an emergency craving called 911 last week to place an order -- and he ended up getting it delivered.

Five-year-old Iziah Hall was at his Wyoming, Mich., home on Sunday when he began craving some McDonald’s. The only problem was Iziah’s grandmother was fast asleep.

According to WZZM, that’s when Iziah grabbed an old phone which had been deactivated years ago and called the only number he could -- 911.

Iziah Hall, 5, was at his Wyoming, Mich., home on Sunday when he placed a 911 call to order some McDonald's. 

Iziah Hall, 5, was at his Wyoming, Mich., home on Sunday when he placed a 911 call to order some McDonald's.  (AP)

Iziah connected to dispatcher and asked her, “Can you bring me McDonald’s?”

Kent County dispatch contacted Wyoming police who sent Officer Dan Patterson to check on the boy, WZZM reported.

On his way to check on Iziah, Patterson stopped by a local McDonalds and picked something up.

"I figured hey I'm driving past McDonald's on my way there and I might as well get him something," he told the station.

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Patterson said when he showed up, Iziah was initially worried that his grandmother would be upset that he'd called the police and asked him to leave.

Iziah’s grandmother said that they were grateful to Patterson, who also advised him about using 911 for emergencies only.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News National

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Man wearing unicorn costume busted for armed robbery

A mythical crowbar-wielding unicorn has been captured in Maryland, officials say.

Jacob William Rogge is now under arrest after targeting a convenience store in Baldwin early Saturday morning while wearing a “full-body white and pink unicorn costume,” Baltimore County Police say.

While inside the store, Rogge used a crowbar to smash a cash register and made off with money and cigarettes, according to cops.

The 28-year-old then jumped into a getaway car allegedly driven by his accomplice, Joseph Philip Svezzese, 27. Police were able to track down the pair after following their vehicle -- which eventually lost control, swerved into oncoming traffic and crashed into a tree.

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Baltimore County Police say the unicorn costume “was discarded prior to the crash but later recovered by police off the side of the roadway in some bushes.” Evidence also reportedly was found tying both men to the convenience store heist.

As for Rogge and Svezzese, they are now each facing numerous charges, including armed robbery and theft. Rogge is still hospitalized in serious condition while Svezzese is being held without bail pending a review hearing.

Source: Fox News National

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German driver who hit New Year’s crowds to remain in clinic

Prosecutors in western Germany say a man who repeatedly drove into crowds early on New Year's Day and injured 14 people can't be held criminally responsible because of his mental condition.

Prosecutors in the city of Essen said Monday they based their decision on an expert opinion. They are calling for the 50-year-old German man to be kept at a psychiatric hospital.

The man drove into people in the city of Bottrop and then in nearby Essen in the early hours of Jan. 1.

At the time, police said the driver made anti-foreigner comments during his arrest and there were indications he'd been treated for mental illness in the past.

The injured people included a 46-year-old Syrian woman who suffered life-threatening injuries.

Source: Fox News World

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MLB notebook: Suspensions issued over Royals-White Sox melee

MLB: Kansas City Royals at Chicago White Sox
Apr 17, 2019; Chicago, IL, USA; Kansas City Royals starting pitcher Brad Keller (56) throws a pitch against the Chicago White Sox during the first inning at Guaranteed Rate Field. Mandatory Credit: David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

April 20, 2019

Kansas City pitcher Brad Keller, Chicago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson and manager Rick Renteria received suspensions for taking part in a benches-clearing incident between the teams on Wednesday.

Joe Torre, chief baseball officer for Major League Baseball, announced the suspensions on Friday.

Keller was suspended for five games and fined an undisclosed amount for intentionally throwing at Anderson. Anderson and Renteria both were suspended one game and also fined an undisclosed amount for their actions during the skirmish.

Renteria served his suspension Friday night when the White Sox took on the Tigers in Detroit. The suspensions for Keller and Anderson are delayed pending appeals.

–Mets ace Jacob deGrom was scratched from his scheduled Saturday start and instead will undergo an MRI exam after his right elbow was “barking,” according to New York manager Mickey Callaway.

Callaway told reporters that deGrom felt pain while playing catch on Thursday. The Mets sent deGrom back to New York on Friday.

Callaway said the team would proceed cautiously with deGrom, who underwent Tommy John surgery in 2010. DeGrom, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, was roughed up badly in each of his last two starts to see his ERA soar to 3.68.

–The New York Yankees signed veteran first baseman Logan Morrison to a minor league contract. MLB.com reported that Morrison has an opt-out date of July 1. He reportedly will make $1 million if added to the big league roster.

Morrison, 31, was an unsigned free agent after batting .186 with 15 homers and 39 RBIs in 95 games for the Minnesota Twins last season. He suffered a torn labrum and underwent season-ending surgery in August.

The signing of Morrison gives the Yankees insurance in case a foot injury suffered by first baseman Greg Bird turns to out be more serious than expected. Bird is one of 12 Yankees on the injured list.

–The Boston Red Sox placed infielder Eduardo Nunez on the 10-day injured list, retroactive to April 18, due to a mid-back strain. Nunez, 31, is batting .159 with five RBIs in 17 games this season.

The team also designated right-hander Erasmo Ramirez for assignment and recalled infielders Tzu-Wei Lin and Michael Chavis from Triple-A Pawtucket.

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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Schiff 'Pretty Compelling Evidence' of Trump Campaign-Russia Collusion

Schiff 'Pretty Compelling Evidence' of Trump Campaign-Russia Collusion

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., on Sunday said there’s “pretty compelling evidence” of Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.

In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Schiff refuted the findings of  Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr, R-N.C., that the panel found no evidence of collusion with Moscow.

"You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence,” Schiff said. “Now, there's a difference between seeing evidence of collusion and being able to prove a criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt.”

"All of this is evidence of collusion,” he added. “And you either have to look the other way to say it isn't, or you have to have a different word for it, because it is a corrupt dealing with a foreign adversary during a campaign.”

Schiff also said the president’s declaration of a national emergency to build his long-promised border wall is “daring the court to strike this down.”

"This is the first time a president has tried to declare an emergency when Congress explicitly rejected funding for the particular project that the president is advocating,” Schiff said. “He's pretty much daring the court to strike this down. It is going to be a real test for my GOP colleagues in Congress and their devotion to the institution."

Source: NewsMax Politics

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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