A former Maida Vale rapper suspected of turning into a fighter for the Islamic State has denied posting a photo online of him holding a severed head.
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 32, was once dubbed as one of Europe’s “most wanted foreign IS fighters” by Spanish police in 2020.
The rapper, who grew up in Maida Vale, was known as Lyricist Jinn and L Jinny in the early 2010s.
He was arrested along with two other people in a southern Spain rented flat.
He went on trial in Madrid on Wednesday (July 12) on suspicion of joining the Islamic State in Syria between 2013 and 2015.
Bary is also accused of running scams online to fund “terrorist activities” and could face a nine-year jail sentence.
According to The Guardian, he denied all charges in court and also denied owning any Twitter accounts that promoted the Islamic State.
He reportedly denied ever visiting Raqqa, saying it was not him in the photo of the severed head, according to The Guardian.
Así detuvimos en #Almería a uno de los Foreign Terrorist Fighters de DAESH más buscados de #Europa. De nacionalidad egipcia, habría entrado ilegalmente en España y se ocultaba en un piso de alquiler. También se arrestó a otras dos personas que lo acompañaban pic.twitter.com/14f2v2brEg
— Policía Nacional (@policia) April 21, 2020
Bary, who carried no documents at the time of his arrest, was stripped of his British citizenship when he allegedly joined the IS in 2013.
He has Egyptian nationality and his Egyptian father, Abdel Abdul Bary, is serving a 25-year prison sentence in the US for his role in the 1998 al Qaida bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.
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