An armed father shot a carjacker in Florida after his vehicle was stolen with his six-year-old boy inside.
The incident began at a home in West Palm Beach on Saturday, when the car thief happened upon a car with the engine on.
The father says he’d turned on the vehicle and went inside to say bye to friends.
The armed dad pursued the thief, Lamar Thurman, 29, in another vehicle and was able to catch up to him after he crashed.
But Thurman again attempted to take off when the dad tried to rescue the boy.
That’s when the dad opened fire “in an attempt to stop him from fleeing further with his child in the car,” according to Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera.
Thurman crashed the vehicle a second time about 200 yards away, police say, and needed to be hospitalized in critical condition.
FILE PHOTO: People walk next to ZTE booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain February 25, 2019. REUTERS/Rafael Marchante/File Photo
March 27, 2019
By Sijia Jiang
HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s ZTE Corp made a net profit of 276 million yuan in the fourth-quarter as it recovered from costly U.S. sanctions which dragged it to an overall 2018 loss of 7.0 billion yuan ($1 billion).
The world’s fourth-largest telecommunications equipment maker by market share was forced to stop most business between April and July last year due to U.S. sanctions. It paid $1.4 billion to lift these and reported its worst half-year loss of 7.8 billion yuan in August.
ZTE’s 2018 loss announced on Wednesday was just within its earlier guidance range of 6.2 billion yuan to 7.2 billion yuan, but was deeper than the average estimate of a loss of 6.2 billion yuan by 10 analysts, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.
The company had expected a first-quarter net profit of 800 million to 1.2 billion yuan, against a net loss of 5.4 billion yuan year earlier. It reported a profit of 4.57 billion yuan in 2017 before it became embroiled in a crippling row with the U.S. government over violations of export restrictions.
ZTE said its revenue for the quarter ending in December was 26.7 billion yuan, while its full-year revenue dropped 21.4 percent to 85.5 billion yuan, against an average estimate of 87 billion yuan by 12 analysts.
(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Stephen Coates and Alexander Smith)
EL PASO, Texas – A West Texas sheriff's deputy was critically wounded Friday after being shot multiple times during a traffic stop, but authorities credited the body armor with saving his life.
El Paso Country Sheriff's Office spokesman Robert Flores identified the wounded deputy as Peter Herrera. He was shot around 1:50 a.m. Friday after he stopped a vehicle in San Elizario, southeast of El Paso along the U.S.-Mexico border. A man in the vehicle started shooting at Herrera after the deputy asked the driver to step out of the car, authorities said.
Herrera did not return fire, Flores said, and the shooter fled on foot along with a female passenger. Two suspects were later taken into custody not far from where the shooting occurred. They have not been identified.
"Thankfully he was wearing a vest," Flores said. "The rounds that actually struck some of the more vital areas of his upper body were stopped by the vest."
One round did strike Herrera in the upper thigh and another grazed his head, Flores said. Herrera was listed in critical but stable condition after undergoing surgery and was recovering in an area hospital.
Investigators are still trying to clarify the "complicated" relationship between the man they believe shot Herrera and the woman who was in the car, Flores said. The woman cooperated with law enforcement and was released from custody.
Officials haven't named the charges pending against the suspected shooter. But car trouble, Flores said, played a role in helping deputies track him down.
"The vehicle, it stalled out on him," the spokesman said. "It definitely helped us solve this crime."
Deputies found the pair hiding in a tool shed a few blocks away from where Herrera was shot, Flores said.
Dozens of fellow deputies and other law enforcement officers from the El Paso Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety lined up in the sheriff office's parking lot to donate blood and plasma Friday during a drive held to benefit Herrera, who has been a deputy for five years.
"We're brothers," said Detective Alan Gurtler, a 30-year veteran of sheriff's office who was preparing to donate plasma in a mobile blood drive bus. "(An) incident like this with a deputy getting shot multiple times in serious condition, it's very rare here."
FILE PHOTO: Thousands of protesters wave Sudanese flags, hold banners and chant slogans during a demonstration in front of the Defence Ministry in Khartoum, Sudan, April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Umit Bektas/File Photo
April 19, 2019
By Michael Georgy and Khalid Abdelaziz
Khartoum (Reuters) – Thousands of protesters demanding an end to military rule flocked to the sit-in outside Sudan’s Defence Ministry on Friday, in the biggest turnout in the center of the capital since last week when former President Omar al-Bashir was ousted and a military council took over.
Protesters waved the Sudanese flag and chanted “freedom, peace and justice”. Children sitting on a bridge nearby banged with stones on the metal pillars to the rhythm of the chants.
The military council has said it is ready to meet some of the protesters’ demands, including fighting corruption, but has indicated that it would not hand over power to protest leaders.
“If we don’t stay it will be as if we hadn’t done anything, we will stay until we oust the military council,” said 26-year-old protester Rania Ahmed.
Not far from the bridge, 10 effigies dressed in security forces uniform and helmets were hanging from a metal pillar, symbolizing protesters’ animosity toward the security forces.
“I look at this everyday and it brings me great happiness,” said Mostafa Abuel Qassem, a 29-year-old photographer.
“This is the pride of the revolution,” he added.
The Sudanese Professionals’ Association (SPA), leading the revolt, has called for sweeping change to end a violent crackdown on dissent, purge corruption and cronyism and ease an economic crisis that worsened during Bashir’s last years in power.
Protesters formed checkpoints at the entrances of the sit-in, wearing yellow vests and body-searching people coming in for weapons to make sure the protest remains peaceful.
Hundreds performed Friday prayers in the sit-in, while hundreds more marched to the area after the praying in mosques nearby.
The sit-in that began on April 6 outside the Defence Ministry was the culmination of 16 weeks of protests triggered by the economic crisis, leading to Bashir being ousted and arrested after three decades in power.
The military council has said a transitional period of up to two years will be followed by elections and that it is ready to work with anti-Bashir activists and opposition groups to form an interim civilian government.
Sudanese have been struggling with sharp price rises and shortages of cash and basic products. Many analysts blame the country’s economic troubles on mismanagement, corruption and the impact of U.S. sanctions, as well as loss of oil revenue when South Sudan seceded in 2011.
(Writing by Amina Ismail; Editing by Frances Kerry)
FILE PHOTO: The Nintendo booth is shown at the E3 2017 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, California, U.S., June 13, 2017. REUTERS/ Mike Blake
April 26, 2019
TOKYO (Reuters) – Nintendo Co Ltd’s shares fell as much as 5 percent in early Tokyo trading, a day after the gaming company offered conservative earnings guidance and urged caution on the roll-out of its Switch console in China.
Nintendo’s shares were down 3.2 percent at 0930 local time (0029 GMT), underperforming the benchmark index which was down 0.8 percent.
The Kyoto-based gaming company said on Thursday it expected to shift 18 million Switch consoles and 125 million software units this financial year.
That software forecast is seen by some analysts as conservative given a games pipeline that includes two full Pokemon titles and the latest in the Luigi’s Mansion and Animal Crossing series.
(Reporting by Sam Nussey; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
FILE - This file photo provided by the Fairfax County Police Department shows Darwin Martinez-Torres, of Sterling, Va. Martinez-Torres is expected to receive a life sentence for raping and killing a Muslim teenager as she walked back to a mosque with friends for religious services. (Fairfax County Police Department via AP, File)
FAIRFAX, Va. – The Latest on the sentencing of man convicted in killing of Muslim teenager in Virginia (all times local):
10:45 a.m.
A man has been sentenced to life in prison for raping and killing a Muslim teenager as she walked back to a mosque with friends for pre-dawn religious services.
The life sentence without possibility of parole imposed Thursday on Darwin Martinez-Torres of Sterling was a formality after his guilty plea last year in the June 2017 slaying of 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen of Reston. That plea bargain required a life sentence but eliminated a potential death penalty.
Hassanen's death received widespread attention amid concerns her slaying was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment. But prosecutors say Martinez-Torres attacked her after he got out of his car to chase Nabra's group of friends in a road-rage confrontation.
Martinez-Torres is an El Salvador native; immigration authorities say he was in the country illegally.
___
A northern Virginia man is expected to receive a life sentence for raping and killing a Muslim teenager as she walked back to a mosque with friends for pre-dawn religious services.
Darwin Martinez-Torres of Sterling struck a plea bargain last year in the June 2017 slaying of 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen of Reston. That plea bargain requires the judge to impose a sentence of life without parole, in exchange for eliminating a potential death sentence.
Hassanen's death received widespread attention amid concerns her slaying was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment. Prosecutors, though, say Martinez-Torres attacked her after he got out of his car to chase Nabra's group of friends in a road-rage confrontation.
Martinez-Torres is a native of El Salvador; immigration authorities say he was in the country illegally.
U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks to media after addressing the 2019 National Action Network National Convention in New York, U.S., April 4, 2019. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
April 4, 2019
By John Whitesides
(Reuters) – Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg said on Thursday that when he used the phrase “all lives matter” in a 2015 speech he did not understand it had been adopted by critics to devalue the Black Lives Matter movement.
Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and fast-rising 2020 White House candidate, told reporters he had not used the phrase again once he became aware it was sometimes used to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement to fight police violence and racism against African-Americans.
“At that time, I was talking about a lot of issues around racial reconciliation in our community. What I did not understand at that time was that phrase … was coming to be viewed as a sort of counter slogan to Black Lives Matter,” Buttigieg told reporters after appearing before a conference of black activists in New York.
“Since learning about how that phrase was being used to push back on that activism, I’ve stopped using it in that context,” he said.
Buttigieg, who reported earlier this week that he raised $7 million for his presidential bid during the first quarter of this year, used the phrase in a 2015 State of the City speech in South Bend, where he has been mayor since 2012.
During the speech, he talked about the need to respect the risks taken by police officers and also recognize the need to overcome the biases implicit in the justice system.
“We need to take both those things seriously, for the simple and profound reason that all lives matter,” he said in 2015, according to a transcript published by the South Bend Voice.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was criticized later in 2015 for using the phrase “all lives matter.”
Wayne Messam, the mayor of Miramar, Florida, who last week declared his own bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, criticized Buttigieg on Thursday for his use of the “all lives matter” phrase.
“‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean that all lives do not matter, rather it is a cry for equal treatment in the greater circle of justice for all Americans,” said Messam, who is African-American.
(Reporting by John Whitesides; Editing by Leslie Adler)
FILE PHOTO: Golf – Masters – Augusta National Golf Club – Augusta, Georgia, U.S. – April 14, 2019 – Tiger Woods of the U.S. celebrates on the 18th hole after winning the 2019 Masters. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
April 26, 2019
Tiger Woods is sending a message that he thinks he still has enough left, emotionally and physically, to win three more major championships to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 titles.
Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.
“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night … that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”
That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.
He said he has been spending time with his children – daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 – who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.
“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”
He said he hopes – maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.
And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.
Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.
“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.
Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.
“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career – one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago – if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.
“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”
The U.S. government say Butina was part of an unofficial influence campaign that overlapped with the 2016 presidential election and targeted conservatives; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from the U.S. district court in Washington.
Maria Butina, the Russian woman who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday by a federal judge in Washington after pleading guilty last year to a conspiracy charge.
Butina, who has already served nine months behind bars, will get credit for time served and can possibly get credit for good behavior, the judge said. She will be removed from the U.S. promptly on completion of her time, the judge added, and returned to Russia.
An emotional and apologetic Butina said in court Friday she is “truly sorry” and regrets not registering as a foreign agent.
“I feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she said, adding that her “reputation is ruined.”
Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018. She entered the court Friday wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit and spoke in clear English, with a slight Russian accent.
“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.
Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said after the sentencing they had hoped for a “better outcome,” but expressed a desire for Butina to be released to her family by the fall.
Prosecutors had claimed Butina used her contacts with the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather information for Russia.
Prosecutors also have said that Butina’s boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, identified in court papers as “U.S. Person 1,” helped her establish ties with the NRA.
In their filings, prosecutors claim federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of being employed by Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.
Investigators recovered several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which Butina referred to the need to keep her work secret and, in one instance, said it should be “incognito.” Prosecutors said Butina had contact with Russian intelligence officials and that the FBI photographed her dining with a diplomat suspected of being a Russian intelligence agent.
Fox News’ Jason Donner, Bill Mears, Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
An official Sri Lankan police Twitter account was deleted after it misidentified an American human rights activist as a suspect in the country’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks.
On Thursday, police posted the names and photos of six people that they said were at-large suspects in the bombings that killed more than 250 people.
However, one of the names on the list was Muslim U.S. activist Amara Majeed, who quickly tweeted that she had been falsely identified.
“I have this morning been FALSELY identified by the Sri Lankan government as one of the ISIS terrorists that committed the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. What a thing to wake up to!” she wrote.
She wrote in a follow-up tweet that the claim was “obviously completely false” and asked social media users to “please stop implicating and associating me with these horrific attacks.”
“And next time, be more diligent about releasing such information that has the potential to deeply violate someone’s family and community,” she continued.
Later, she wrote an update saying police apologized for wrongly mistaking her as a suspect.
Police said in a statement: “However, although one of the released images was identified as one Abdul Cader Fathima Khadhiya in the information provided by the CID, the CID has now informed that a) the individual whose image was labeled as Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya is not in fact Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya b) the individual pictured is not wanted for questioning c) Abdul Cader Fathima is the correct name of the suspect wanted by the CID.”
On Friday, the account, @SriLankaPolice2 was deleted with no explanation. Police did not release more information regarding the mistake.
Majeed, who founded “The Hijab Project” when she was 16 years old, told the Baltimore Sun that it was hurtful to be linked to the attacks.
“Sri Lanka is my motherland,” the Brown University student said. “It’s very painful to be associated with [the bombings].”
Mohamed Zahran, the suspected leader of the attacks which targeted six hotels and churches, killed himself in a suicide bombing at the Shangri-La hotel. Police also said they had arrested the second-in-command of the group, called National Towheed Jamaat. Catholic churches in Sri Lanka canceled all Sunday Masses until further notice over concerns that they remain a top target of Islamic State-linked extremists.
DNA Force Plus is finally here! Now you can support optimal energy levels while adapting your body to handle the daily bombardment of toxins to overhaul your body’s cellular engines with a fan-favorite formula.
DNA Force Plus is finally here! Now you can support optimal energy levels while adapting your body to handle the daily bombardment of toxins to overhaul your body’s cellular engines with a fan-favorite formula.
DNA Force Plus is finally here! Now you can support optimal energy levels while adapting your body to handle the daily bombardment of toxins to overhaul your body’s cellular engines with a fan-favorite formula.
DNA Force Plus is finally here! Now you can support optimal energy levels while adapting your body to handle the daily bombardment of toxins to overhaul your body’s cellular engines with a fan-favorite formula.
DNA Force Plus is finally here! Now you can support optimal energy levels while adapting your body to handle the daily bombardment of toxins to overhaul your body’s cellular engines with a fan-favorite formula.
DNA Force Plus is finally here! Now you can support optimal energy levels while adapting your body to handle the daily bombardment of toxins to overhaul your body’s cellular engines with a fan-favorite formula.
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)
Click below to consent to the use of the cookie technology provided by vi (video intelligence AG) to personalize content and advertising. For more info please access vi's website.