Trial starts in Madrid of British ex-rapper and Isis suspect

The 32-year-old from west London, who allegedly posted an image of himself holding a severed head on Twitter, went on trial at Spain’s National Criminal Court for joining the Isis group while visiting Syria between 2013 and 2015.

Prosecutors also accuse him of running ‘online scams’ with two friends to fund ‘terrorist activities’. They are calling for a nine-year jail sentence.

When he was arrested back in April 2020 in the southern city of Almeria, Andalusia [see Tweet below], several days after arriving by boat from Algeria, the Spanish police described the British-Egyptian national as one of IS’s ‘most wanted foreign terrorist fighters’.

He is accused of publishing a grisly photo in August 2014 in which he can be seen posing with a severed head in the Syrian city of Raqqa with the caption: ‘Chillin’ with my homie, or what’s left of him.’

Standing in court, Bary denied all the charges against him.

‘I find it absurd that (the prosecution is saying) I’m one of the foreign terrorist fighters,’ he told the court, wearing a patterned short-sleeved shirt, black jeans and dark-framed glasses, his mostly-shaved head topped by a ponytail.

‘Al Qaeda and all the radical extremists … I hate them. I don’t agree with their ideology or their actions,’ he said, speaking in a mix of Spanish and English.

He also denied owning any Twitter accounts that promoted IS, saying he went to Syria ‘for humanitarian reasons’. Bary also denied ever visiting Raqqa, saying it was not him in the photo with the severed head.

He is the son of Adel Abdel Bary, an Egyptian who in 2015 was jailed for 25 years by a US court for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 and wounded 5,000 others.