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Egypt court sentences Islamists to 5 years in prison

An Egyptian court has sentenced 36 people convicted of joining the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood organization to five years in prison.

The Alexandria criminal court on Tuesday also sentenced the defendants to five years of probation. They were arrested in Alexandria in 2017.

The sentences can be appealed.

The Brotherhood won a series of free elections following Egypt's 2011 uprising but was branded a terrorist group after the military overthrew an elected but divisive Islamist president in 2013. Since then, courts have held mass trials and sentenced hundreds of people to death.

Rights groups have repeatedly criticized such mass sentencings in Egypt and called on authorities to ensure fair trials.

Source: Fox News World

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IMF’s Lagarde says Brexit extension avoids ‘terrible outcome’

FILE PHOTO: IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde delivers a speech in Washington
FILE PHOTO: International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde delivers a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, U.S., April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

April 11, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said on Thursday the delay of Britain’s separation from the European Union avoids the “terrible outcome” of a “no-deal” Brexit that would further pressure the global economy.

Lagarde told a news conference, however, that the arrangement will prolong uncertainty and won’t resolve the issues between Britain and the EU.

“At least UK is not leaving on April 12 without a deal. It gives time for continued discussions between the various parties involved in the UK. It probably gives time for economic agents to better prepare for all options, particularly industrialists and workers, in order to try to secure their future,” Lagarde said. “A no-deal Brexit would have been a terrible outcome.”

(Reporting by David Lawder and Leika Kihara; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Source: OANN

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Missouri woman arrested after claiming she shot boyfriend reenacting movie scene, cops say

Missouri police say they have arrested a woman for murder who claimed to have fatally shot her boyfriend as they were drinking and acting out a scene from a movie they had been watching.

Kalesha Peterson, a 37-year-old nurse, admitted shooting David Dalton, 36, in the head Thursday night with a .38-caliber handgun, but claimed it was an accident, the Fulton Police Department said in a news release.

She was charged with felony murder and unlawful use of a weapon and jailed without bail.

FLORIDA WOMAN SHOOTS PARTNER AFTER ALCOHOL-FUELED ARGUMENT OVER HIS SNORING: DEPUTIES

Police said that Peterson told them during an interview after the shooting that they had been drinking and watching a movie.

“Peterson advised that at some point Dalton suggested the two play out a scene in the movie that involved a firearm,” police said. “Peterson advised that the two retrieved a handgun kept in the bedroom to act out the scene.”

Peterson further stated that she had the gun in her hand when it discharged, according to the news release. She then called 911 to request immediate medical attention for Dalton.

Police did not identify the movie Peterson claimed she and her boyfriend had been watching.

Peterson was given a breathalyzer test, which showed she had been drinking, police said. She admitted being drunk on whiskey, they said.

TEEN PLANNED TO SHOOT EX-GIRLFRIEND AT SCHOOL, DOCUMENTS SAY

In addition, police said Peterson told them she had taken several medications as she was drinking. The news release said that some of those medications increase impairment when taken with alcohol.

KOMU-TV reported interviewing Dalton’s sister, Mary Bonner, who wasn’t buying Peterson’s explanation for the shooting.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“My brother deserves justice and no, I don’t think they were reenacting a movie,” she told the station. “That doesn’t sound like David at all.”

Source: Fox News National

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Brazil court orders Vale employees, contractors arrested again

FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: Members of a rescue team search for victims after a tailings dam owned by Brazilian mining company Vale SA collapsed, in Brumadinho
FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: Members of a rescue team search for victims after a tailings dam owned by Brazilian mining company Vale SA collapsed, in Brumadinho, Brazil January 28, 2019. REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File Photo/File Photo

March 13, 2019

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – A Brazilian court in the state of Minas Gerais on Wednesday ordered the arrest of Vale SA employees and contractors who an appeals court had let go after they were charged in the January dam burst that killed hundreds of people, according to a court statement.

The employees and contractors had been released by an appeals court order on Feb. 5. The disaster in Brumadinho killed 200 people and 108 are still unaccounted for. Vale did not immediately comment on the report.

(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer; Editing by David Gregorio)

Source: OANN

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Futuristic Helicopter to Replace Army’s Apache Fleet

The U.S. Army is considering whether it should purchase Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) to replace its aging fleet of Boeing AH-64 Apache and Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior copters, reported Task & Purpose.

“The FARA will only replace Apaches in our heavy attack reconnaissance squadrons and this represents about half of the Apache fleet,” a spokesperson for Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Aviation Week.

“There have already been serious questions about whether the AH-64 platform will be able to remain relevant, especially in a high-end conflict environment, through 2048, when the Army plans to retire the very last of the gunships,” Joseph Trevithick at The War Zone explained.

“The Army expects to be integrating significant upgrades into its latest AH-64E Guardian variants through 2026. These include updates to its fire control and targeting systems, improved data sharing and fusion capabilities, better sensors, a more robust ability to work directly with unmanned aircraft and more,” Trevithick added.

In 2018, the Army selected several FARA candidates. Sikorsky is currently in the running with the S-97 Raider high-speed scout and attack helicopter. Bell is developing a V-280 Valor tiltrotor that was also selected.

Video: Sikorsky S-97 Raider flight test:

Video: Bell V-280 Valor flight test:

“We’re looking for an aircraft that, without going into specific requirements or classifications, essentially goes further, can see further, can acquire specific targets further and can engage at greater ranges than current exist and has greater legs – can fly further with a greater payload of weapon systems,” Milley told Congress on March 26, 2019.

The Army could purchase hundreds of FARA helicopters within the next ten years. If a new helicopter replaces the AH-64 and OH-58D, then the service could be looking at 700 new aircraft – a contract worth tens of billions of dollars.


Alex Jones presents video footage of an elderly, Jewish man being attacked and called a Nazi for simply wearing a Make America Great Again hat.

Source: InfoWars

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Barbara Bush didn’t consider herself Republican, blamed Trump for ‘heart attack,’ new book says

Former first lady Barbara Bush got candid in the final months before her death, blaming President Trump for her heart attack and saying she didn’t consider herself a Republican.

Bush died in April 2018 at age 92, shortly after her family announced she was in failing health. Her husband, former President George H.W. Bush passed away a few months in November at age 94.

According to an excerpt from the upcoming book “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty,” author Susan Page, who is also USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, asked the former first lady in October 2017 if she considered herself a Republican. Bush said she did. However, when Bush was asked the same question in February 2018, she had a different answer.

“I’d probably say no today,” she replied.

Barbara Bush campaigns for her son Jeb Bush in New Hampshire on Feb. 4, 2016.

Barbara Bush campaigns for her son Jeb Bush in New Hampshire on Feb. 4, 2016. (Getty Images)

Bush was hesitant to campaign for her son Jeb when he launched his 2016 presidential bid because she saw first-hand from her husband and other son, George W., how “brutal” the presidency -- and the road to it -- could be. She said she decided to campaign for Jeb because he was her child and “because she was alarmed by Trump,” Page wrote.

BARBARA BUSH, FORMER FIRST LADY, DEAD AT 92

Jeb Bush ended up dropping out of the race after a poor showing in the South Carolina primary.

In 2016, Barbara Bush suffered what she called a "heart attack" and blamed the episode on the presidential campaign and Trump’s constant ridicule of Jeb during the election cycle.

However, Bush’s criticism of Trump goes back to the 1990s. Page read some of Bush’s diaries and found clippings of Trump’s separation from his first wife Ivana.

“The Trumps are a new word, both of them,” she wrote in her diary. “Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly. So sad.”

Later, the former first lady spoke about Trump’s candidacy and surprise about his supporters.

“I don’t understand why people are for him,” she said.

GEORGE AND BARBARA BUSH THROUGH THE YEARS

Bush wrote in her diary that she “could not vote for Trump or Clinton” and ended up writing Jeb’s name on the ballot.

Before Trump won, Bush had a note prepared to send to Bill Clinton that said, “Welcome to the First Ladies Club” as a joke. However, she “woke up and discovered to my horror that Trump had won.”

A friend of Bush’s sent her a “Trump countdown clock” which showed how much time remained in the Trump presidency. She kept the gag gift on the bedside table.

After Trump won, Bush met with the newly elected president and wrote in her diary that he “was very nice.” She also penned letters to first lady Melania Trump and second lady Karen Pence.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Blue Jays’ Guerrero Jr. excels in Triple-A debut

FILE PHOTO: MLB: Spring Training-Pittsburgh Pirates at Toronto Blue Jays
FILE PHOTO: Mar 8, 2019; Dunedin, FL, USA; Toronto Blue Jays third baseman Vladimir Guerrero (27) runs to first during the third inning of a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Dunedin Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Butch Dill-USA TODAY Sports

April 12, 2019

Toronto Blue Jays prospect Vladimir Guerrero Jr. made his debut with Triple-A Buffalo on Thursday and showed why many think he is already ready to join the big league club.

The third baseman, who is the son of Hall of Fame member Vladimir Guerrero, had a walk, a double and a three-run home run, finishing the night 2-for-4 at the plate with four RBIs.

Guerrero, 20, was sidelined this spring with a left oblique strain and was sent to rehab the injury and start the season with Triple-A Buffalo.

He spent time last season at Double-A New Hampshire and Triple-A Buffalo.

In 61 games in New Hampshire, the younger Guerrero batted .402 with 14 home runs and 60 RBIs. After his promotion to Buffalo, he hit .336 with six home runs and 16 RBIs in 30 games.

The Blue Jays will gain a year of service time should he spend at least 15 days in the minors before being called up. Had he not been injured, the team likely would have been criticized if it had left him off the roster to ensure the extra year of control.

It is expected the Blue Jays will call him up to the majors early in the 2019 season.

Guerrero Jr. was hitting .211 with no home runs over 19 at-bats before he was injured.

–Field Level Media

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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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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