A few years ago Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary ‘whispered’ as a rapper. He was making his place in the world of music. A young British man of Egyptian origin with a goatee, skinny and dark circles under his eyes, who shot words at full speed in the form of a rap. No one knew then that his father is a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden and he was arrested and convicted of the simultaneous terrorist attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 224 people and injured 5,000. However, ten years ago he changed music for AK-47s, went to Syria to fight and ended up in Spain with the intention of setting up a jihadist cell to carry out attacks, or at least that’s what the Prosecutor’s Office accuses him of.
Today the trial has started in the National Court against Abdel Bary, known musically as L-Jinny, but no one would say it was him. With thirty kilos of more and his anti-Salafist and pro-Western speech and disowning his father, one might think that he had given himself a change in jail where he awaits to be tried and hear the sentence.
The United Kingdom had been following in his footsteps for years. In fact, he had already withdrawn his British nationality after learning that he had gone to Syria to fight, abandoning his English life and his artistic future. During the interrogation, to which he answered in Spanish, he denied all the accusations. He alleges that he went to Syria for humanitarian aid, he presents himself as a man of peace and justifies that he left for Turkey when he saw that the Muslims were killing each other.
“I have lived thirty years in the United Kingdom. I am an open-minded person, I do not agree with closed minds, I believe in freedom of belief”, this young man has defined himself for whom the Prosecutor’s Office requests nine years in prison for belonging to a terrorist organization.
His account of those years has nothing to do with that of the prosecutor, who defends that he left the United Kingdom to go to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. “He did it in the company of a friend and both joined the Al Furgan Army, a terrorist faction of Al Qaeda that sometimes acted with DAESH on certain occasions.”
Even Abdel Bary used several Twitter accounts in which he acknowledged belonging to the Islamic State and being in Syria. In 2014, he even published an image of himself holding the head of a person in a square in Raqqa. He denies everything. They are not his accounts nor is he in the photo. Deny the major
When an American drone kills his friend in 2015, he decides to go to Turkey and enters with a false passport. His argument is that one night all his documentation was stolen and his family also informed him that the United Kingdom had withdrawn his nationality after the false accusation that he had been the one who had beheaded an American journalist James Foley. “They have ruined my life. I have lost my British nationality, I have appeared as the one who cuts off the head of the journalist Foley. Nobody has asked me for forgiveness, or an apology after proving that it was not me, ”he has snapped at questions from his lawyer.
Abdel Bary was circulating with a false identity through Syria, Turkey, Algeria and Spain. An Egyptian national, he has defended that he had no choice because if he was deported they would kill him because “it is a country where human rights are not respected. That is why I came to Europe ”, he stressed.
That is the reason he uses to enter Spain by boat, via Almería and be able to meet his daughter again, in 2020 and not to create a terrorist cell, following in the footsteps of his father, whom he disowned and said he had no relationship or Share your postulates. His plan in Spain was not to attack but to do business with cryptocurrencies, smoke marijuana, drink and listen to music.
Together with him, they arrested two other young people who had arrived in Spain with him in a boat. 4,000 euros to arrive from Algeria by clandestine boat. Together they rented an apartment despite it being a coincidence, according to them, that they found themselves there. One of them was just passing through to get to the United Kingdom where his pregnant woman was; the other was just a 25-year-old who wanted to come to Germany to start a new life and perhaps try out in the world of boxing, who had to stay in Spain due to the closure of borders due to Covid.
These two knew each other through the business of buying and selling imitation clothing in Turkey to take it to their country of origin. They define themselves as open-minded people who did not know that their roommate Ahmed Mohamed was actually Abdel Bary. The police have indications that they were fully aware of his real identity and that he was acting as his boss in a terrorist cell. “If he had offered me to be part of a cell, I would have broken his head. For me, Salafism is like ETA in Spain,” KC has defended himself.
