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Zuckerberg Panics After Arrest Threats

Silicon Valley has been operating like a mafia.

Whether its the Bill of Rights or advertising competition, the little people have been stepped on by overzealous, billionaire nerds.

These geeks saturated with tech-dominated power are given slaps on the wrist by the U.S. Congress for major violations of the First Amendment.

However, in Europe, the tables are slowly turning on the Silicon Valley overlords.

Of course, the little people are still going to get the short end.

EU regulators have been pummeling Google with antitrust penalties, multi-billion dollar fines that have been generally laughed off as parking tickets.

Recently, as WRAL reports, “The EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, announced the results of the long-running probe of Google’s AdSense advertising business at a news conference in Brussels…..Today’s decision is about how Google abused its dominance to stop websites using brokers other than the AdSense platform.”

But now, following the Christchurch New Zealand shooting, the threat of arrest is starting to get a real response.

The live-streaming on social media of the Christchurch terror attack in New Zealand was viewed 4,000 times before being removed from Facebook and now Mark Zuckerberg has raised the white flag after sheepishly banning white nationalists from his platform.

The Facebook CEO believes new regulation is needed in four areas across the internet — harmful content, election integrity, privacy and “data portability.”

Zuckerberg said, “Every day we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyber attacks.”

“Zuck” is panicking over receiving all of the blame for getting rich off a platform liable for live-streaming mass shootings.

But in the end, Silicon Valley’s power-mad mistakes and submission could transform the internet into something resembling China’s social credit system where everything you do online is monitored and used against the individual in the name of centralized control, rendering the internet a once useful tool for humankind when freedom wasn’t hunted down and destroyed.

Source: InfoWars

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Florida agency probes video that allegedly shows man jumping on pelican

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is working to determine what charges might be appropriate to bring against a Maryland man who was videotaped tackling a federally protected pelican in Key West.

The Baltimore Sun reports Hunter Hardesty, of Davidsonville, posted the video of the apparent attack online on Thursday. Commission officer and spokesman Bobby Dube says Hardesty enticed the pelican and then jumped on it. He says authorities are considering possible animal cruelty charges.

The video shows Hardesty leaning over the water near the edge of a harbor that's geotagged to the Florida Keys. It shows him then jumping off the harbor and landing on top of the pelican, launching a scuffle punctuated by the laughter of onlookers.

SEE IT

The bird then slapped Hardesty across the face with its beak and fled.

The Baltimore Sun reached out to Hardesty on Saturday and did not get a response. The report said he received flack on his Facebook page and responded to one post, “Next time ima eat him for dinner !! Wonder what they taste like.”

Rick Ramsay, the Monroe sheriff, told The Miami Herald Saturday that he contacted FWC.

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“He will be held accountable for this attack on wildlife,” Ramsay posted. “Thanks to everyone who provided help with the video, identification and where he lives.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Source: Fox News National

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UPM to close magazine paper machine in Germany, cutting 160 jobs

FILE PHOTO: Magazine paper rolls are seen at UPM-Kymmene’s paper mill in Kaukas, Lappeenranta
FILE PHOTO: Magazine paper rolls are seen at UPM-Kymmene’s paper mill in Kaukas, Lappeenranta, Finland March 9 2016. Picture taken March 9, 2016. Reuters/Jussi Rosendahl/File Photo

April 2, 2019

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Finnish paper maker UPM said on Tuesday it planned to close a magazine paper machine in Germany, cutting output to match weaker demand and lowering costs.

UPM said it expected to cut 160 jobs at the Plattling mill near the Czech border and reduce the annual capacity of coated mechanical paper by 155,000 tonnes.

UPM is one of the world’s largest makers of magazine paper, a sector which has been among the worst hit by a shift to digital publishing.

“Paper markets globally have been declining consistently over the past 10 years,” Winfried Schaur, Executive Vice President at UPM Communication Papers, which includes magazine papers, said in a statement.

On Jan. 31, UPM forecast good demand in 2019 for most of its papers – excluding its Communications Papers unit, where it saw demand continuing to decline.

UPM will book 30 million euros ($34 million) in restructuring charges in the second quarter related to the closure, which will generate annual savings of 17 million euros.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Mark Potter)

Source: OANN

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The Latest: Woman who hid evidence had affair with Frazee

The Latest on the case of the death of a missing Colorado woman (all times local):

1:20 p.m.

A woman who has pleaded guilty to helping thwart the investigation into a Colorado woman's disappearance told police that she was in a romantic relationship with the man now charged in his fiancee's death.

Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Gregg Slater testified Tuesday that Krystal Jean Lee Kenney told investigators that she and Patrick Frazee became involved in March 2018.

Slater said Kenney told police that Frazee claimed his fiancee, Kelsey Berreth, abused the couple's 1-year-old daughter. Slater said there is no evidence of abuse.

Kenney said Frazee suggested that she drug a coffee and give it to Berreth. Police said Kenney admitted going to Berreth's home to give her a coffee in September. Kenney said she did not tamper with that drink.

Frazee is charged with murder and solicitation to commit murder. Berreth has not been found.

___

12:10 p.m.

Police searching the home of a missing Colorado woman initially found no evidence of foul play but later discovered traces of blood belonging to Kelsey Berreth.

The new information was revealed Tuesday during a court hearing. Berreth's fiance, Patrick Frazee, has been charged with murder and solicitation to commit murder in the 29-year-old's death. He has not entered a plea.

Authorities had released little information about what led to Frazee's arrest until Tuesday.

Police searched Berreth's Woodland Park home after she was reported missing Dec. 2 and found no evidence inside the home. But several days later, Berreth's parents reported finding blood in the bathroom.

Tests later determined blood found on the toilet, the exterior of the bath tub, a trash can, electrical outlet, door hinges and a towel rack belongs to Berreth.

___

10:30 a.m.

Prosecutors have filed additional charges against the Colorado man charged with murder and solicitation to commit murder in the death of his missing fiancee.

Patrick Frazee is in court Tuesday for a hearing to determine whether he will stand trial in Kelsey Berreth's death. Her body has not been found but police have said evidence suggests she was killed at her home on or around Thanksgiving.

Colorado prosecutors added a charge accusing Frazee of tampering with a deceased body and two charges of committing a crime of violence, which would let the state request a harsher penalty on conviction.

A Woodland Park Police commander later testified that cellphone location data showed Berreth's and Frazee's phones were in the same location after Nov. 22, the date Frazee told police he last saw Berreth.

___

7:46 a.m.

A Colorado man charged with murder and solicitation to commit murder in the death of his missing fiancee is scheduled to appear in court.

Prosecutors are expected to discuss the evidence that led to Patrick Frazee's arrest during the hearing Tuesday morning.

Frazee was charged in December, more than a month after the last sighting of 29-year-old Kelsey Berreth.

Authorities have released little information about the case and key court records remain sealed.

Berreth's sudden disappearance bewildered the flight instructor's family and drew national media attention.

Her body has not been found. Police believe she was killed at her home in the small mountain city of Woodland Park on or around Thanksgiving.

Frazee, who is 32, has not entered a plea. He has been jailed since his arrest.

Source: Fox News National

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Malaysian police say 41 Rohingya men land on northern beach

Malaysian police say a group of 41 Muslim Rohingya men have been detained in the northernmost state of Perlis, the second group to have landed in the country in just over a month.

Police say the men landed Monday on the same beach where 34 Rohingya women and children were found stranded March 2.

Police say one of the men told police they were part of over 200 Rohingya in a large boat that sailed overnight from Thailand and that 47 of them were transferred to a smaller boat to Perlis.

Based on the information, he said some 200 Rohingya are still believed to be stranded at sea in Thai waters and six others that landed in Malaysia are still missing.

Source: Fox News World

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Kellyanne Conway: There’s ‘Trouble in Pelosi Paradise’

White House counsel Kellyanne Conway on Sunday taunted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., asserting there’s rancor among the Democrat rank-and-file that’s causing “trouble in Pelosi paradise.”

In an interview on NBC News’ “Meet The Press,” Conway declared new Democrat House members are “upset with the leadership.”

“There is a great frustration against rank and file members who represent districts that President [Donald] Trump won in 2016,” she said. “They have been to the White House, talked to people like me quietly, saying they wish that the radical… freshmen who get the magazine covers and all the ink and air time, I guess they are upset with the leadership today.”

Conway went on, saying Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., “tweeted they are tired of being used because the party is diverse, can't get a seat at the table, something… re-tweeted by [Rep.] Ilhan Omar [D-Minn.].”

“I think there is trouble in Pelosi paradise,” Conway said.

Conway also declared the immigration problems in the country could be fixed “easily” but that Democrats are too anti-Trump to get the job done.

“Congress can fix this easily,” she said. “All the time that they spend reacting to every single Donald Trump tweet or the president's statements, they can sit down and do three things.”

According to Conway, the three fixes would be to address trafficking victims, fix a judicial decision on filing asylum claims and to “fix the asylum law so those who actually have a credible claim of asylum can have that process faster. “

Related Stories:

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Social media services blocked in Sri Lanka after deadly attacks, group says

Sri Lankan authorities have blocked most social media services in the country following attacks that killed more than 200 people on Easter, according to officials and a group that monitors Internet censorship.

Sri Lankan officials said Sunday they were blocking social media temporarily to curtail the spread of false information and ease tensions until their investigation is concluded.

POPE CELEBRATES EASTER SUNDAY AMID BLOODSHED IN SRI LANKA

More than 200 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in eight bomb blasts that rocked churches and luxury hotels in or near Sri Lanka’s capital on Easter Sunday — the deadliest violence the South Asian island country has seen since a bloody civil war ended a decade ago.

Defense Minister Ruwan Wijewardena described the bombings as a terrorist attack by religious extremists, and police said 13 suspects were arrested, though there was no immediate claim of responsibility. Wijewardena said most of the blasts were believed to have been suicide attacks.

“People were being dragged out,” said Bhanuka Harischandra, of Colombo, a 24-year-old founder of a tech marketing company who was going to the city’s Shangri-La Hotel for a meeting when it was bombed. “People didn’t know what was going on. It was panic mode.”

He added, “There was blood everywhere.”

The NetBlocks observatory said it detected an intentional nationwide blackout of popular services including Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram.

The group said the country also was blocking messaging apps.

Facebook said in a statement that people rely on its services to communicate with loved ones and it was committing to maintaining service in the country.

Harischandra, who witnessed the attack at the Shangri-La Hotel, said there was “a lot of tension” after the bombings, but added: “We’ve been through these kinds of situations before.”

He said Sri Lankans are “an amazing bunch” and noted that his social media feed was flooded with photos of people standing in long lines to give blood.

NetBlocks director Alp Toker said such post-attack shutdowns are often ineffective and can end up creating an information vacuum that's easily exploited.

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“Having experienced the open and welcoming Sri Lanka during my last week traveling through the country, I had a sense that the country was turning the corner, and in particular those in the tourism industry were hopeful for the future,” said Peter Kelson, a technology manager from Sydney.

“Apart from the tragedy of the immediate victims of the bombings, I worry that these terrible events will set the country back significantly,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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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Source: InfoWars

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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