Former British rapper, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary who travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State group has been arrested in Spain.
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, who was one of the most wanted militants in Europe, was arrested in a counter-terrorism swoop on Tuesday.
Sources close to the investigation told The Associated Press that police arrested Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary and two other men at a rented apartment in Almería, a port city in southeastern Spain, the AP learned from officials on the ground.
A media release from Spain’s National Police didn’t name Abdel Bary. It described him as an Egyptian national who left Europe to fight in Syria and Iraq.
The police statement also called him “one of the most sought terrorists in Europe, both because of his criminal trajectory in the ranks of Daesh (Islamic State) and because of the high danger that he represented.”
It was also revealed that the three men had adapted themselves to the COVID-19 emergency in Spain, after entering the country illegally.
The three were being interrogated on Tuesday and were scheduled to appear before a National Court judge in Madrid on Wednesday, according to a spokesman for the court.
Abdel Bary, originally from Maida Vale in London, Bary was a joint British-Egyptian national but he was stripped of his UK citizenship because of his links to the terror group.
He is the son of an Egyptian operative of al-Qaeda who was convicted in New York and sentenced in 2015 to a 25-year prison term for events related to the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people.
Abdel Bary, who is believed to be 29, grew up in London to become a rapper known as Lyricist Jinn and L Jinny.
Watch video from the arrest below.
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
