Last Thursday in Barcelona, ??the Civil Guard arrested a suspected jihadist who allegedly sent the Islamic State (IS) up to 200,000 euros in cryptocurrencies to allegedly finance terrorist actions. The arrested person, known as the crypto-jihadist, is a computer engineer of Jordanian origin who managed to form a network with international ramifications to capture funds that were then destined for Syria or Turkey. Faced with the possible risk of escape, the National Court has sent him to preventive detention.
This is the first operation of the information service of the armed institute which, from the first moment, has followed the trail of cryptocurrencies to find the suspected terrorist. Other times, some individual’s computer sleuthing has come across the fortuitous finding of these virtual currencies. According to police sources, the investigation began two years ago and has involved the French DGSI, the American FBI, the Swedish SÄPO and Europol, in addition to the National Intelligence Center (CNI). .
The crypto-jihadist – who had a Spanish passport – was arrested on Thursday in Barcelona, ??where he had moved from Turkey. His trips to the Catalan capital were frequent as a commercial agent for several companies. According to sources close to the investigation, the arrested person is just one of the links in an international network of financing jihadist terrorism. Researchers give it an important role as a collector and facilitator. The funds were collected thanks to regular propaganda campaigns carried out by the Islamic State on its various Telegram profiles.
Once the funds arrived, the detainee’s objective was to make it as difficult as possible to trace these economic movements so that they ended up in the hands of the terrorist organization without the forces and security forces of the State noticing. In this virtual mess, the detainee was the owner of several cryptocurrency addresses that operated in three different networks and were linked to multiple addresses that “formed a network with ramifications in several countries”, as the Civil Guard reported yesterday.
The case, coordinated by the central court of inquiry number 6 of the National Court, remains open. Efforts will now focus on analyzing the million messages that investigators have found on various electronic devices that were intercepted. The translation of this huge amount of messages will slow down the progress of the investigation, but the same sources believe that these analyzes could be used to open new lines of investigation or lead to new arrests.
The profile of this detainee is completely different from that of those arrested for jihadism in Spain. He was not at all radicalized in violence – nor did he have in mind to carry out any attack – his Jordanian origin is unusual and he had high knowledge in IT and economics. However, the use of cryptocurrencies to finance terrorism is not a new practice. It was already developed during the beginning of the last decade.
This aspect of terrorist financing increased in intensity during the covid pandemic and after. The health situation experienced in 2020 served as a catalyst for this new threat to security, and led to the emergence of new terrorist tendencies specialized in the economic field to compensate for the loss of personal mobility that was restricted in several countries for health reasons.
In this way, these sophisticated current means of financing promoted by fully specialized crypto-jihadists severely complicate the investigations of the security services. It is at this point that international cooperation “becomes one of the most decisive instruments” – as the Ministry of the Interior explains – to be able to neutralize these networks, given that the activity developed through the same networks is increasingly most important and has become one of the priorities of the security agencies in the fight against terrorism.
