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French pilot in 1976 Uganda hijacking dies at 95

A French pilot who's remembered as a hero for his actions in the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane to Uganda's Entebbe airport has died at the age of 95.

Michel Bacos was awarded the Legion of Honor, France's highest decoration, for refusing to leave the plane's passengers after the plane was hijacked and grounded. Some 110 hostages were held in the airport terminal for nearly a week by seven pro-Palestinian hijackers before Israeli commandos freed them.

Nice mayor Christian Estrosi said in a statement Bacos died on Tuesday in the southern French city.

"By refusing with bravery to quit in the face of anti-Semitism and barbary, he honored France", Estrosi said.

Four hostages were killed along with the terrorists.

Source: Fox News World

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Gol, LATAM bids for Avianca Brasil assets may hit antitrust snag

FILE PHOTO: Employees are seen at the desk of Avianca airlines at Afonso Pena International Airport in Sao Jose dos Pinhais
FILE PHOTO: Employees are seen at the desk of Avianca airlines at Afonso Pena International Airport in Sao Jose dos Pinhais, Brazil December 13, 2018. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker/File Photo

April 5, 2019

By Marcelo Rochabrun

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – A new plan by cash-strapped carrier Avianca Brasil to sell its most coveted airport slots to Brazil’s two largest airlines will draw intense antitrust scrutiny, which may delay or derail a pressing cash injection.

Antitrust regulator CADE said on Friday that it could block the plan, which Avianca Brasil hopes could raise some $210 million later this month. The airline filed for bankruptcy protection in December.

Under the plan, Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes SA and LATAM Airlines Group would buy Avianca Brasil’s airport rights, known as slots, in three high-traffic terminals in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Gol and LATAM already control over two-thirds of the slots in each of those three airports.

Representatives for LATAM, Avianca Brasil and Gol did not respond to requests for comment.

Avianca Brasil’s plan would raise much-needed funds but is high-risk, lawyers said, and could leave it hanging without quick cash. Creditors will vote later on Friday whether to approve the plan which would allow Gol and LATAM to bid on the assets.

Avianca Brasil would not receive any funds until CADE greenlights the operation, said antitrust lawyer Tatiana Lins Cruz in an interview on Thursday. She said CADE could take up to eight months to analyze a case in which buyers already control more than 20 percent of a given market.

Meanwhile, the airline would have to continue operations with its own money. But Avianca Brasil has been so cash-strapped that it fell behind its payroll in March.

A person familiar with LATAM’s thinking said the airlines hoped CADE would approve the deals because they only involve a modest increase in their presence at Brazil’s busiest airports.

AZUL SIDELINED

The new plan is a setback for rival Azul SA, which ranks as Brazil’s third largest airline and has a small presence in those three airports. In Sao Paulo’s domestic Congonhas airport, Gol and LATAM already control a combined 92 percent of the slots, whereas Azul has just 3 percent.

Azul had struck a preliminary deal with Avianca Brasil to take over the slots for $105 million and had already provided some $8 million so the carrier could meet its March payroll.

But that deal was off once Gol and LATAM came in.

CADE appeared to take a more positive view of an Azul takeover on Friday.

“A scenario where Azul becomes the buyer represents a lower antitrust concern than in a scenario with LATAM or Gol,” the regulator said in its report.

The plan could also draw scrutiny from Brazil’s civil aviation regulator, because airport slots are not meant to be bought and sold. Azul was planning to buy Avianca Brasil’s assets as a single airline, but the new plan would create seven different companies, each holding little more than slots.

“In our view, it is not clear whether the Brazilian Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) will approve this new structure,” wrote analysts at Brazil bank Bradesco BBI in a note to clients.

(Reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun; Editing by Brad Haynes and Richard Chang)

Source: OANN

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Gravesites of former President Gerald Ford, First Lady Betty Ford vandalized in Michigan, police say

Authorities in Michigan are asking for help in identifying two people captured on camera defacing the gravesites of former President Gerald R. Ford and former First Lady Betty Ford last week.

The Grand Rapids Police Department said on Facebook the incident happened around 4 p.m. on March 27 on the property of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids.

In surveillance footage released by police, a man and a woman can be seen arriving on the property on skateboards.

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

After kicking the skateboards toward the site, the couple can be seen sitting on a wall while appearing to pry away the letters.

A man and woman who can be seen trying to pry off a letter at the gravesite of former President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A man and woman who can be seen trying to pry off a letter at the gravesite of former President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Grand Rapids Police Department)

The two suspects eventually took the letter "E" from the word "committed" off the wall of the burial site, where the phrase “Lives Committed to God, Country and Love” is inscribed along with the names of the Fords and the years they were born and died.

Museum officials told FOX17 they had to spend $400 to replace the stolen letter.

“The president and First Lady are interred here, this is a presidential grave site,” Museum Deputy Director Joel Westphal told FOX17. “There are not many presidential grave sites, we are one of only 14 presidential museums around the country.”

FLORIDA AUTHORITIES SEEKING DRIVER WHO ALLEGEDLY STOPPED FOR PERSON CROSSING, THEN HIT THEM WITH CAR

The former president died in December 2006 at the age of 93. The former first lady died in 2011, also at age 93.

Former President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford are interred at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Former President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford are interred at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Getty Images)

Museum officials said they hope the two suspects are soon found, and view the act as extreme vandalism. They are also looking into other legal action against the pair, FOX17 reported.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

Anyone with information about the suspects is asked to contact the Grand Rapids Police Department at 616-456-3836 or 616-456-3989 or Silent Observer at 616-774-2345.

Source: Fox News National

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Oil prices hit highest in five months as Libya fighting tightens supply

FILE PHOTO: A general view of the El Sharara oilfield, Libya
FILE PHOTO: A general view of the El Sharara oilfield, Libya December 3, 2014. REUTERS/Ismail Zitouny/File Photo

April 9, 2019

By Henning Gloystein

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Oil prices on Tuesday reached their highest since November as concerns over exports from war-torn Libya stoked tightness in the market, with global supply already hit by OPEC-led production cuts and U.S. sanctions on Iran and Venezuela.

International benchmark Brent futures touched their strongest level since last November at $71.34 per barrel on Tuesday, and were still at $71.16 at 0057 GMT, up 6 cents, or 0.1 percent, from their last close.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures also hit a November 2018 high, at $64.77 per barrel, before easing to $64.58, which was still 18 cents, or 0.3 percent, above their last settlement.

“Renewed fighting in Libya … has seen Brent crude break above $70 per barrel,” said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank.

Libya is a significant supplier of oil to Europe, producing around 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude in March.

A warplane attacked Tripoli’s only functioning airport on Monday as eastern forces advancing on the Libyan capital disregarded international appeals for a truce in the latest of a cycle of warfare since Muammar Gaddafi’s fall in 2011.

Hansen said the fighting in Libya added to an already tense market, which has been tightened this year by U.S. sanctions on oil exporters Iran and Venezuela as well as supply cuts led by the producer club of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

As a result, Brent and WTI crude oil futures have risen by 41 and 31 percent respectively since the start of the year.

(Reporting by Henning Gloystein; Editing by Joseph Radford)

Source: OANN

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Alabama sets execution for 1997 quadruple killing

Alabama has scheduled a lethal injection for a man convicted in the 1997 deaths of four people, including two young girls.

The Alabama Supreme Court set a May 16 execution date for Michael Brandon Samra.

Samra was convicted of helping his friend Mark Duke kill his father Randy Duke, his father's girlfriend Debra Hunt and her 6 and 7-year-old daughters.

Authorities say Mark Duke killed his father, Hunt and one of the girls, and Samra slit the throat of the other child.

Prosecutors said the slayings happened after Duke became angry when his father wouldn't let him use his truck.

Both of them were sentenced to death. Duke's death sentence was reversed because he was 16 at the time of the crime. Samra was 19 at the time of the crime.

Source: Fox News National

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The Latest: Spain busts trafficking gang in northern Africa

The Latest on migrants trying to get to Europe (all times local):

10:15 a.m.

Spanish police say they have arrested 17 members of an alleged human trafficking network that threatened Moroccan migrants who sought a refund when attempts to reach Europe by sea failed.

The National Police said Tuesday the busted cell operated from Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave in northern Africa.

The alleged traffickers charged between 1,500 and 4,000 euros ($1,700 to $4,500) for taking the Moroccan migrants across the Straits of Gibraltar in high-speed rubber boats. According to police, a hitman threatened the migrants who dared to ask for a refund if they failed to complete the trip.

More than 5,500 migrants have reached Spanish shores this year and 121 have died trying to, according to the International Organization for Migration. Last year, a record 57,000 arrived and more than 800 died.

___

9:35 a.m.

Turkish authorities say three women and an infant have died after a fiberglass boat carrying migrants to Greece sank off the Turkish coast.

The coast guard said 11 other migrants were saved in an air and sea search mission launched early Tuesday off the town of Ayvacik, in northwest Canakkale province.

The privately owned DHA news agency said the boat, carrying 15 migrants from Iran and Afghanistan, was heading to the Greek island of Lesbos. The three women and the infant who died were from Afghanistan, the report said.

Migrants have been trying to get from Turkey into Greece, which is in the European Union, before heading to more prosperous European nations.

A 2016 deal between Turkey and the EU significantly curbed numbers but migrants still attempt the perilous journey.

Source: Fox News World

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Google, Facebook, Twitter have to do more to fight fake news: EU

FILE PHOTO: A combination photo from files of Facebook Google and Twitter logos
FILE PHOTO: Facebook, Google and Twitter logos are seen in this combination photo from Reuters files. REUTERS//File Photo

April 23, 2019

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Google, Facebook and Twitter have to do more to tackle fake news ahead of key European Parliament elections next month, the European Commission said on Tuesday, as its latest report showed a lack of progress in some areas.

The monthly reports follow a pledge made by the tech giants and advertising trade bodies in October last year to combat the spread of fake news and avoid more heavy-handed regulations.

The EU has warned of foreign interference during campaigning for the European Parliament elections and national elections in Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Poland, Portugal and Ukraine in recent and coming months.

“Further technical improvements as well as sharing of methodology and data sets for fake accounts are necessary to allow third-party experts, fact-checkers and researchers to carry out independent evaluation,” the EU executive said.

The Commission said Google had made insufficient progress in defining issue-based advertising. The report covered actions taken by the companies in March.

It said Facebook, which took down eight coordinated inauthentic behavior networks originating in North Macedonia, Kosovo and Russia, failed to disclose whether these affected EU users.

Twitter also fell short because it did not provide details on its measures against spam and fake accounts and also did not report on any action to improve the scrutiny of ad placements.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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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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