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China city offers cash for information in religion crackdown

A southern Chinese city is offering cash rewards for information about "illegal religious groups" as the ruling Communist Party continues to tighten its grip over faith communities.

A notice posted on the official website of the Guangzhou Department of Ethnic and Religious Affairs said up to 10,000 yuan ($15,000) would be paid for verified information and assistance in hunting down key members and leaders of illegal foreign religious groups and revealing their structures.

The department said smaller rewards would be offered for reports about religious venues set up without permission and behavior encouraging "religious extremism."

Under President Xi Jinping, the officially atheistic ruling party has sought to eliminate all religious expression not under its direct control, especially that by Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim ethnic minority groups.

Source: Fox News World

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Terry Gou’s Taiwan presidential run fuels rally in Foxconn shares

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, is seen on top of the company's building in Taipei
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, is seen on top of the company's building in Taipei, Taiwan, March 30, 2018. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

April 18, 2019

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Shares of Foxconn and its Shanghai and Hong Kong-listed units soared on Thursday as investors cheered news that the chairman of the world’s largest contract manufacturer will run for president of Taiwan.

Gou, Taiwan’s richest person with a net worth of $7.6 billion according to Forbes, said on Wednesday he would join the already competitive presidential race, and take part in the opposition, China-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) primary elections.

Foxconn in a statement on Tuesday said Gou would remain chairman, though he planned to withdraw from his company’s daily operations.

On Wednesday, it said daily operations are handled by a team of professional managers, indicating that business would continue as usual.

“In terms of economic fundamentals, Taiwan stocks are not bad,” said Cathay Futures Vice-President Anderson Chien.

“If Gou runs for the election, the market may draw parallels to the rally in the U.S. stock market after U.S. President Trump won in 2016,” Chien said, referring to Donald Trump similarly being a businessman before turning attention to the presidency.

Foxconn, formally Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, climbed as much as 5.9 percent to T$97.20, the highest since October 2018. The stock is up more than 8 percent so far this week.

Handset maker and Foxconn unit FIH Mobile Ltd jumped as much as 58 percent to HK$2.23, its highest since February 2018, and was on track for its sixth consecutive session of gain. The stock has soared more than 100 percent so far this week, heading for its best week since its February 2005 listing.

“Punters are excited by the news and that boosted the stocks of the group of companies,” said Alex Wong, a director at Ample Finance. However, he said, a correction – when a stock price falls as investors in tandem sell at a profit – could come at any time.

FIH’s stock ranked as the second-biggest percentage gainer in early trade, tracking a rally in its parent Foxconn. It has outperformed the Hang Seng Commerce & Industry Index sector by 55.2 percentage points in the past month.

Shares in Foxconn Industrial Internet Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Foxconn, soared to the maximum-allowed limit of 10 percent, hitting their highest since June 2018.

Foxconn Industrial has jumped 25 percent this week and nearly 70 percent so far this year, far outpacing the broad market.

The Hong Kong-listed shares of Foxconn Interconnect Technology Ltd, Hon Hai’s electronic and optoelectronic connectors maker unit, rose as much as 14.3 pct to the highest since February 2018. The stock is up 15 percent this week.

(Reporting by Donny Kwok and Jeanny Kao; Writing by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

Source: OANN

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Dems Set To Push Major Gun Control Legislation This Week

In a sign of the significance of the Democratic victory in the midterms and a fulfillment of a key campaign promise by the party, the House is set this week to pass a bill that requires federal background checks on all gun sales, including private transactions, Politico reported on Monday.

House Democrats also will vote to extend the deadline for federal background checks from three business days to as many as 20, legislation designed to close a loophole which allowed white supremacist Dylann Roof, who shot to death nine blacks at a church in Charleston in 2015, to purchase a gun despite pending felony drug charges against him.

The legislation comes as gun deaths in the U.S. have reached their highest level in nearly 40 years, according to CNN.

But in the most high-profile congressional vote on gun control in years, the bills are likely to run into a major roadblock in the GOP-controlled Senate, because both the National Rifle Association and President Donald Trump oppose them, Politico reported.

The NRA said the universal background checks bill “criminalizes the private transfer of firearms and targets law-abiding gun owners for persecution,” adding that it would be unenforceable without establishing a federal gun registration.

Regarding the other bill, GOP Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia said "The 20-day waiting period is excessive [and]... an onerous process that unduly burdens potential firearms purchasers."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi countered by saying, “Too many families in too many places have endured the heartbreak of gun violence — and for far too long, the Congress has failed to take action to end this senseless pain. “This long-overdue bill respects the will of the American people.”

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Erdogan says Turkey will solve Syria issue ‘on the field’ after Sunday’s elections

Turkish President Erdogan addresses his supporters during a rally for the upcoming local elections, in Ankara
FILE PHOTO: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters during a rally for the upcoming local elections, in Elmadag district of Ankara, Turkey March 28, 2019. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via REUTERS

March 30, 2019

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey will solve the Syria issue “on the field” after Sunday’s local elections, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday, as he sought to drum up support for his AK Party in the vote.

Turkey has carried out two cross-border operations against Kurdish militants in northern Syria and has warned that it will launch further incursions if the threats along its borders are not eliminated.

“First thing after the elections, we will solve the Syria issue on the field if possible, not at the table,” Erdogan told supporters in the first of his six rallies in Istanbul.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Source: OANN

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U.S. senators’ new bill would ban online ‘dark patterns’ that trick consumers

FILE PHOTO - Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) listens to military families discuss their hazardous living conditions during a meeting at the Peninsula Workforce Development Office in Newport News
FILE PHOTO - Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) listens to military families discuss their hazardous living conditions during a meeting at the Peninsula Workforce Development Office in Newport News, Virginia, U.S. March 11, 2019. REUTERS/Ryan M. Kelly

April 9, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senators Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Deb Fischer, a Republican, are introducing a bill on Tuesday to ban big online companies like Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc from using deception to push consumers to do things they otherwise would not do.

The bill would also ban online platforms with more than 100 million monthly active users from designing addicting games or other websites for children under age 13.

The bill takes aim at “dark patterns” developed using behavioral psychology, which mislead people into giving personal data to companies or otherwise trick them into doing something they would not do.

A website aimed at tracking dark patterns identifies behavior such as a website or app showing that a user has new notifications when they do not.

“Our goal is simple: to instill a little transparency in what remains a very opaque market and ensure that consumers are able to make more informed choices about how and when to share their personal information,” said Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in a statement.

The bill would bar companies from choosing groups of people for behavioral experiments, unless the companies get informed consent.

Under the terms of the bill, social media companies would create a professional standards body to create best practices to deal with the issue. The Federal Trade Commission, which investigates deceptive advertising, would work with the group.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Susan Thomas)

Source: OANN

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The Latest: Suspect arrested twice previously at mall

The Latest on a 5-year-old child injured in an apparent attack at Minnesota's Mall of America (all times local):

5 p.m.

Court records show a 24-year-old Minneapolis man suspected of throwing or pushing a 5-year-old boy from a balcony at the Mall of America was charged in two previous incidents at the mall.

Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda was arrested on July 4, 2015, after police said he matched the description of a man throwing things off the upper level of the mall to the lower level. Police say Aranda refused to give his name and resisted arrest. Aranda also was accused of walking into a mall store and sweeping his hand across a display table, breaking glasses.

In October 2015, Aranda was accused of throwing glasses in Twin Cities Grill in the mall. The complaint says Aranda approached a woman who was waiting for the restaurant to open and asked her to buy him something. The woman refused, and Aranda allegedly threw a glass of water in her face and a glass of tea that struck her leg. Aranda was under a trespass notice at the time banning him from the mall until July 4, 2016.

Aranda was chased and arrested Friday after the boy was thrown or pushed from a third-floor balcony and landed on the first floor at the mall. The boy suffered life-threatening injuries.

___

4:30 p.m.

A 24-year-old Minneapolis man is being held on suspicion of attempted homicide in an apparent attack in which a 5-year-old boy was pushed or thrown from a third-floor balcony at the Mall of America.

Police identified Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda as the man who was chased and arrested after Friday morning's incident at the megamall in suburban Minneapolis.

The child suffered life-threatening injuries and is being treated at a hospital. Details of his condition weren't immediately available.

Aranda's criminal record includes two convictions in 2015 for obstruction of the legal process/interfering with a peace officer, as well as convictions for fifth-degree assault, trespassing and damage to property.

___

4:15 p.m.

Police in Minnesota say a 5-year-old boy suffered life-threatening injuries when he was pushed or thrown from a third-floor balcony at the Mall of America.

Witnesses say the boy's mother was screaming and asking others to pray for her son.

Tina Hailey of Burnsville, Minnesota, tells the Star Tribune she was walking with her husband on the mall's first floor when she heard screams. Hailey says the mother appeared to be in shock and "didn't know what to do," and that "Nobody was helping her."

Witnesses say a suspect ran away and was arrested at the mall's transit station. The 24-year-old man from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area is being held at the Bloomington Police Department.

The boy was taken to a hospital. His condition is unknown.

Police say the suspect apparently does not know the victim or the victim's family.

___

Corrects Hailey's first name to 'Tina' instead of 'Tiny.'

___

2:15 p.m.

A witness says a woman screamed that her child was thrown from a balcony at the Mall of America in Minnesota.

Brian Johnson told WCCO-TV the woman was screaming, "Everybody pray, everybody pray. Oh my God, my baby, someone threw him over the edge."

Johnson says the woman was screaming that her child was thrown from a third-floor balcony at the Bloomington, Minnesota, mall. The child landed on the first floor on Friday morning.

Police say the child is 5 years old. The police chief says the child suffered "significant injuries" and was taken to a hospital.

A suspect was arrested at the mall. Police don't think there is any relationship between the man and the child or the child's family. Authorities don't know a motive.

___

12:55 p.m.

Police in Minnesota say they've arrested a 24-year-old man in an incident in which a child may have been pushed or thrown from a balcony at the Mall of America.

Bloomington Police Chief Jeffrey Potts says witnesses told police that the child may have fallen from the mall's third level to the first floor on Friday morning. Potts says officers gave first aid but the 5-year-old child suffered "significant injuries" and had been taken to a hospital.

Potts says the suspect took off running right after the incident but was quickly found and arrested at the mall.

He says police don't think there is any relationship between the man and the child or the child's family. He says police don't have an idea about possible motive.

___

12:46 p.m.

Police in Minnesota say they're investigating an incident at the Mall of America in which a child was reportedly thrown from a third-floor balcony.

Police in Bloomington tweeted that a 5-year-old child suffered injuries and was being treated at a hospital Friday. Police didn't immediately respond to a message seeking details about the incident.

The Star Tribune reports that the child was being treated at Children's Hospital in Minneapolis.

Source: Fox News National

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Sell Montana to Canada for $1 trillion to ease US national debt, petition says

Montana should be sold to Canada to help pay off some of the U.S.'s national debt, according to a petition on Change.org.

Ian Hammond, the petition creator, wants to sell The Treasure State to the nation's neighbor to the north for $1 trillion.

TRUDEAU'S TOP ADVISER RESIGNS BUT DENIES WRONGDOING

“We have too much debt and Montana is useless. Just tell them it has beavers or something,” the petition description read.

More than 7,000 people have already signed the petition as of Tuesday. The petition was looking to garner at least 7,500 online signatures.

2 MONTANA WOMEN SUE BORDER PATROL AFTER CLAIMING THEY WERE DETAINED FOR SPEAKING SPANISH

There were plenty of supporters for Montana to join Canada.

“Sell Montana to Canada - sounds good to me. Think I will move back to Montana,” Tom Jones wrote.

Others thought to even sweeten the deal by throwing in California, Texas or Ohio.

There was at least one who thought Montana becoming part of Canada was a bad idea.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“Love you my American friends. Love you more because you aren't here. We have enough trouble with Trudeau's (our Prime Minister) socialism,” George Lyche wrote. “We don't need to import more from your whacko-democrats. Here's the new 'green deal' - we'll pay you to stay home!!”

Source: Fox News National

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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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