Spain arrests ‘most wanted’ IS jihadist

ALMERIA - Spanish police detained one of Europe's most wanted fugitive Islamic State (IS) fighters in the southern town of Almeria, the government said.

The 28-year-old British-Egyptian citizen Abdel Majid Abdel Bary, who has fought in Syria and Iraq, was hiding in an apartment with two other people who were also arrested and were being identified by police, the interior ministry said in a statement late on Tuesday.

The man has appeared in gory propaganda pictures of IS crimes, the ministry said.

"The detained man spent several years in the Syria-Iraq area and presents peculiar personality features such as an extremely violent criminal profile which caught the attention of police and intelligence services in Europe," the statement added, without disclosing his identity.

The three suspects had come via North Africa and were keeping a low profile during Spain's coronavirus lockdown, exiting the apartment one-by-one and wearing protective masks

Police are eager to intercept many of the dozens of Spanish Muslims who left for Syria and Iraq to fight alongside IS and may now want to perpetrate attacks on home soil such as the killing of 16 people in Barcelona in 2017.

L.Jinny the rapper

The younger Abdel Bary was a rapper who went by the stage name L.Jinny, or Lyricist Jinn, and even received some radio play.

At the time, he lived in his family house in west London, said to have been worth around a million pounds, before fleeing to Syria to join IS in 2013.

His father Adel Abdel Bary had been previously indicted by the US for disseminating al-Qaeda’s claim of credit for the August 1998 bombings of American embassies.

The following year Washington asked London to extradite him for trial in the US, but it wasn’t until 2012 when he was finally transferred to US custody.

In August 2014, the younger Abdel Bary posted a picture of himself on Twitter holding the decapitated head of a Syrian soldier in Raqqa’s central square, captioned “chillin’ with my homie, or what’s left of him’.

Other pictures he has posted also include decapitated bodies and severed heads.

At the time, IS was threatening Erbil and Baghdad after taking control of over one third of Iraq.

An international military effort was launched to defeat the terrorist organisation, driving them out of all major strongholds and reducing the so-called ‘caliphate’ into scattered sleeper cells.