Civil society leaders claim they tipped off police about threats posed by Zahran
Kattankudy’s civil society members had written directly to the top ranks of Sri Lanka’s state intelligence service, informing them of the threat Zahran posed, a civil society member claims. Joining us in a dimly lit library belonging to Jamiathul-ul-Falah Arabic College, M.B.M. Firthous, a school teacher and president of a civil society group, recounts how he and other members of the society began tipping off intelligence officers known to them about Zahran’s cultish ideology and the perils it carried, as far back as two years ago.
This happened following a clash between Zahran’s followers and the followers of Moulawi Abdul Rauf, the leader of a Sufi sect, at the Aliyar Junction in 2017. A police crackdown saw nine suspects arrested, but Zahran had fled the scene and was not seen by most people in Kattankudy since.
Sometime later, when these civil society members enquired from the intelligence officers as to why no action was taken against Zahran and his group, they had expressed their helplessness saying all they could do was to inform their seniors, which they claimed they had done.
Firthous then makes a startling revelation. With ample evidence gathered about Zahran’s sympathy towards the ISIS’s cause, which was available for public display on his Facebook page for years, the civil society group members had drafted a letter and forwarded it to senior intelligence ranks in Colombo four months ago. But they haven’t heard of any follow up actions.
Knowledge of Zahran’s ISIS connections were made known to the local people after he had started distributing ISIS propaganda pamphlets translated into Tamil since 2015. He had also translated ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s sermons and ISIS war songs into Tamil, which were posted on his public Facebook page.
Zahran’s vision of the world or the Islamic State, Firthous said, divided people into three categories. The first are the believers (Muslims), then come the unbelievers who pay the Jizyah tax and are allowed to live, and finally the rest of the unbelievers (and this includes the Muslims that don’t conform to his interpretation of the religion) who have to be killed. This is the same ideology followed by ISIS.
“This is a gross misinterpretation of Islam,” Firthouse says. “There is no such thing in the Quran or Hadeeth.”
Firthous then proceeds to explain the term ‘Thowheed’ as nothing more than the ‘belief in the oneness of God’, which is a principle all Muslims believe. He lamented that Zahran and his group’s actions had now turned the concept into a vile profanity in the minds of Sri Lankans. In a statement, the Federation of Civil Organisations in Kattankudy says: “Even at times when our people were massacred by the hundreds while worshipping in mosques {a reference to the 1990 mosque attacks carried out by the LTTE}, our properties were destroyed and we were evacuated from our homes, we maintained peace and tranquility. We did not turn against our motherland or people in this beautiful country.
“We never resorted to violence. But the recent series of bombings in the churches in Kochchikade, Negombo and Batticaloa and the hotels in Colombo have brought disgrace on us. We feel ashamed. A feeling of guilt is frustrating us when we hear that this act of terrorism has been reportedly committed by a very few radical elements suspected to be from Kattankudy [sic] also.
“The mistake every one of us made is that we did not precisely understand the magnitude of his planning and affiliations.”
Reclining slightly, Firthous utters with a sense of regret and shame that Kattankudy will forever be etched in the minds of other Sri Lankans as a terrorist hub.
“We were recovering from what happened during the war, and I was one of the first to meet Navi Pillay and the UN Human Rights delegation when they came here. Now, no one will be willing to help us,” he laments.