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Julian Assange not a ‘hero,’ Obama DHS chief Jeh Johnson says

Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is not a “hero” and that it was a "complex" question as to whether Assange's role publishing classified documents on the Iraq War counted as legitimate journalistic activity.

"He apparently aided and assisted in the leak of classified information," Johnson, who served in the Obama administration, said on "Fox & Friends". "At some point, there may be a debate whether he was a journalist and that was legitimate journalist activity but I do not regard him as a hero."

WIKILEAKS FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE ARRESTED AFTER ECUADOR WITHDRAWS ASYLUM

Assange was arrested by British police Thursday after Ecuador withdrew his asylum because of alleged repeated violations of “international conventions and protocol.”

Assange had lived in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 when British courts ordered him extradited to Sweden to face questioning for a sexual assault case -- that case has since been dropped.

Video of Assange’s arrest showed him with a full white beard and yelling something out to reporters as he was being dragged from the embassy, but it was unclear what he said.

He also faces possible extradition to the U.S. for publishing thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is facing a federal grand jury investigation over its publication of American diplomatic and military secrets during the Iraq War. His supporters have said that Assange was a journalist -- something Johnson said was up for debate.

"There may be a claim that what he was doing was legitimate journalist activity and what constitutes a journalist is a more complex question in the age of the Internet, but I do not regard him as a hero," he said.

JULIAN ASSANGE'S ARREST DRAWS FIERCE INTERNATIONAL REACTION

The U.S. Justice Department revealed the existence of a sealed criminal case against Assange in a court filing last year. Johnson said that if there was an attempt to extradite Assange to the U.S., it would be a "lengthy" process.

His attorney released a statement saying it was “bitterly disappointing” that Assange was arrested.

“First and foremost, we hope that the UK will now give Mr. Assange access to proper health care, which he has been denied for seven years,” attorney Barry Pollack said. “Once his health care needs have been addressed, the UK courts will need  to resolve what appears to be an unprecedented effort by the United States seeking to extradite a foreign journalist to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information.”

Johnson’s remarks echo those by U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who tweeted Thursday morning: “Julian Assange is no hero and no one is above the law.”

“He has hidden from the truth for years,” he said.

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Johnson also weighed in on the escalating crisis on the southern border, and said that “by any measure” it was a crisis that risked overwhelming border patrol and the humanitarian effort on the border.

“I think we have to get away from Democrat versus Republican and crisis versus no crisis,” he said. “This is a crisis by any measure.”

Fox News’ Ryan Gaydos, Lillian LeCroy and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Pompeo urges France not to approve digital services tax

FILE PHOTO: Pompeo testifies in House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testifies at a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the State Department's budget request for 2020 in Washington D.C., U.S. March 27, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott/File Photo

April 4, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged France in a meeting with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on Thursday not to approve a digital services tax, saying it would hurt U.S. technology firms, the U.S. State Department said.

France and Britain as well as Italy and Spain are pushing ahead with plans for such taxes after EU countries failed to reach an agreement for the bloc as a whole.

“Secretary Pompeo urged France not to approve a digital services tax, which would negatively impact large U.S. technology firms and the French citizens who use them,” the State Department said after Pompeo met Le Drian on the sidelines of a NATO ministerial meeting Washington.

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: OANN

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Pope condemns politicians who want walls to keep migrants out

Pope Francis addresses reporters aboard the plane bringing him back following a two-day trip to Morocco
Pope Francis addresses reporters aboard the plane bringing him back following a two-day trip to Morocco March 31, 2019. Alberto Pizzoli/Pool via REUTERS

March 31, 2019

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Sunday said political leaders who want walls and other barriers to keep migrants out “will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build”.

The pope made his comments to reporters aboard the plane returning from Morocco in response to a question about migration in general and about U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to shut down the southern border with Mexico.

“Builders of walls, be they made of razor wire or bricks, will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build,” he said.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Source: OANN

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Sen. Harris a Gun Owner Who Wants Stronger Gun Laws

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., revealed Thursday she is a gun owner – but said she still wants stricter gun laws.

"I am a gun owner – and I own a gun for probably the reason that a lot of people do, for personal safety," the 2020 presidential primary contender told reporters in Iowa, the New York Post reported. "I was a former prosecutor."

A Harris campaign aide said the weapon she owns is a handgun, which she keeps locked up, CNN reported. The aide told the news outlet that Harris bought the gun years ago.

Harris discussed her gun history after meeting supporters at a house party in Des Moines — including members of Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America, the grassroots movement that is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun control advocacy group in the country, CNN reported.

"For too long, and still today, we are being offered a false choice which suggests you're either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone's gun away," Harris said, attributing the problem to a "lack of courage" from leaders.

Harris called gun violence a "clear problem in our country" and pushed for "smart gun safety laws — which include universal background checks and a renewal of the assault weapons ban. Period," she said, the Post reported.

At a January CNN town hall, shortly after declaring her candidacy, Harris said Congress would have acted after 20 children and six adults were murdered Dec. 14, 2012, at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School if lawmakers had been placed in a locked room without press and required to examine "the autopsy photographs of those babies," CNN reported.

"And then you can vote your conscience. This has become a political issue," she said.

Source: NewsMax America

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EU’s Barnier says current Brexit deal is only one available

European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Barnier delivers a speech during a debate on Brexit, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg
European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier delivers a speech during a debate on Brexit after the vote on British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

March 14, 2019

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – The current deal struck between Brussels and London over Britain’s exit from the European Union is the only one available, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator said on Thursday.

“If the United Kingdom still wants to leave the European Union and if it wants to leave in an orderly manner, which is what the prime minister says, then this treaty, such as it is, which organizes the orderly separation, this treaty is the only one possible and available,” Michel Barnier said, holding up a copy of the withdrawal treaty that has been rejected twice by Britain’s parliament.

“We need, in order to go further, not to have a negative vote against the treaty or against a no deal, but a constructive and positive vote,” he continued.

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie, writing by Philip Blenkinsop, editing by Andrew Heavens)

Source: OANN

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Judge extends custody for suspect in Utrecht shooting

Makeshift memorial at tram shooting site in Utrecht
FILE PHOTO: A makeshift memorial is seen at the site of a tram shooting in Utrecht, Netherlands March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

March 22, 2019

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A Dutch judge on Friday extended for two weeks the detention of the suspect in a shooting that killed three people in the city of Utrecht this week.

Turkish-born Gokmen Tanis, 37, is accused of carrying out the shooting aboard a tram out of terrorist intent, while authorities are also investigating whether he had other personal motives.

Prosecutors a day earlier had said they believe Tanis had a radicalized ideology and that there was no evidence of any relationship between him and the victims.

Tanis, who has been convicted of illegal weapons possession, shop lifting and burglary in recent years and has to appear in court on rape charges in July, is believed to have acted alone.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte is expected to join a march through Utrecht on Friday evening, commemorating the 19-year old woman and the 28-year old and 49-year old men who were shot dead in the attack.

The Utrecht District Court said the judge had ruled that Tanis should be permitted to communicate only with a lawyer.

(Reporting by Toby Sterling and Bart Meijer; Editing by Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan)

Source: OANN

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From backstop to Brino, AP translates the language of Brexit

From backstop to Brexiteer, Britain's decision to leave the European Union has spawned a baffling array of new terms.

The Associated Press deciphers some key words and phrases:

ARTICLE 50: Article 50 of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty sets out the procedure for a country wishing to leave the bloc and imposes a two-year countdown to that country's departure. Britain triggered the process on March 29, 2017, and was due to leave on March 29, 2019. Amid deadlock in Britain's Parliament the EU agreed a BREXTENSION until April 12, and the U.K. is now seeking a second delay.

BACKSTOP: The Brexit backstop is part of the withdrawal agreement between the EU and Britain. It's an insurance policy designed to ensure there are no customs checks or other border infrastructure between the U.K.'s Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland after Brexit. The backstop says if no other solution is found, Britain will remain in a customs union with the EU in order to keep the Irish border open. Opposition to the backstop from pro-Brexit British lawmakers is the main reason the deal has been defeated in Parliament

BREXHAUSTION: The state of anxious weariness felt by many U.K. citizens and politicians at the unresolved Brexit crisis, almost three years after Britain voted to leave the EU.

BREXIT: A contraction of "British exit," Brexit is Britain's departure from the European Union. The U.K. joined the bloc in 1973, and held a 2016 referendum on its membership that was won by the "leave" side.

BREXITER/BREXITEER: A supporter of Britain's exit from the European Union.

BREXTREMIST: Pejorative term for a Brexit supporter.

BREXTENSION: Brexit extension, a delay to Britain's exit from the EU. The bloc has already granted one postponement, from March 29 to April 12, and Prime Minister Theresa May is seeking another delay to give Britain time to break its Brexit impasse. One possibility is a "flextension" (see below).

BRINO: An acronym that means "Brexit in name only." It's a pejorative term used by Brexiteers for a "soft Brexit" departure in which Britain retains close economic and regulatory ties with the European Union.

CONFIRMATORY VOTE: A new referendum in which voters would be asked whether to approve any Brexit deal passed by Parliament. The other option would be remaining in the EU, so this plan is mainly favored by those who hope Brexit can be stopped. Also known by its supporters as a "people's vote."

CUSTOMS UNION: The European Union customs union makes the 28-nation bloc a single customs territory, with no tariffs or border checks on goods moving between member states. It also has common tariffs on goods entering the bloc from the outside.

EUROPEAN UNION: Formed in 1957 as the European Economic Community by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the group is now a 28-nation bloc of more than 500 million people with substantial powers over member nations' laws, economies and social policies.

FLEXTENSION: A form of Brexit delay that would give Britain a long extension to its departure date, but with the possibility of leaving earlier if Parliament approves a Brexit deal.

HARD BREXIT: A Brexit that sees the U.K. cut many of its ties with the EU, including leaving the EU's vast single market and customs union. Some supporters of the idea prefer the term "clean Brexit," and say it will enable Britain to forge its own trade deals around the world.

INDICATIVE VOTE: Britain's Parliament has held a series of non-binding "indicative votes" on various Brexit outcomes as a way of finding out whether any have majority support. Lawmakers rejected every option, from leaving the EU without a deal to holding a new referendum on whether to remain.

LEAVER: A Briton who voted to leave the European Union. See also Brexiteer.

NO-DEAL BREXIT: If Britain and the EU do not finalize a divorce deal, Britain will cease to be an EU without an agreement setting out what happens next. A no-deal Brexit would rip up the rules that govern ties between the U.K. Many businesses say that would cause economic chaos, and Parliament has voted to rule it out — though it remains the legal default option.

REMAINER: A Briton who voted to stay in the European Union.

REMOANER, REMAINIAC: Pejorative terms for people who want the U.K. to remain in the EU.

SINGLE MARKET: The EU's single market makes the bloc a common economic zone in which goods and services can move freely with no internal borders or barriers.

SOFT BREXIT: A Brexit that sees the U.K. retain its close economic ties with the EU, including membership in the bloc's single market and customs union.

WITHDRAWAL AGREEMENT/POLITICAL DECLARATION: In November 2018, Britain and the EU struck a two-part divorce agreement. It consists of a legally binding, 585-page withdrawal agreement setting out the terms of the U.K.'s departure, and a shorter, non-binding political declaration committing the two parties to close future ties. The agreement must be approved by the British and European parliaments to take effect, but Britain's Parliament has rejected it three times.

___

Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

Source: Fox News World

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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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