Jihadi Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 32, who was long thought to be one of the ISIS Beatles is found dead in his Spanish prison cell

From the Daily Mail

A former British rapper once believed to be the ISIS killer ‘Jihadi’ John has been found dead in his prison cell in Spain.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 32, had been tried earlier this month at a court in Madrid on suspicion of heading an itinerant jihadist cell he allegedly formed after leaving Syria, and was awaiting the verdict.

He is understood to have been found dead at a prison in El Puerto de Santa Maria in Cadiz, south west Spain. One unconfirmed local report said his body presented no obvious signs of any violence.

Prison guards are said to have discovered his lifeless body after he failed to answer a wake-up call. He had returned to the prison after his trial in Madrid where he spent several days in a local jail.

An internal Spanish Prison service investigation will now take place and his family will be given the right to hold their own autopsy aside from the official post-mortem to establish the exact cause of death.

A separate probe will be carried out by a court in the town of El Puerto de Santa Maria.

Abdel Bary was born in Egypt but schooled in London. He was stripped of his British citizenship after allegedly joining ISIS and was charged after a long-running investigation sparked by his arrest at a hideaway rented flat in Almeria.

On the opening day of his trial he denied all terrorism charges against him, insisting he had never been in the Syrian city of Raqqa before claiming he went to the country for humanitarian reasons. Prosecutors said in a pre-trial indictment that the former British national, the son of Adel Abdel Bari who confessed to murdering more than 200 people in a series of Islamist bombings in Africa, used bitcoin to buy stolen or cloned bank cards on the Dark Web. Prosecutors also accuse him of running “online scams” with two friends to fund “terrorist activities”. They  called for a nine-year jail sentence.

He was alleged to have posted an image of himself holding a severed head on Twitter. He was accused of posing for a photo with the head in the Syrian city of Raqqa with the caption ‘Chillin’ with my homie or what’s left of him’ in August 2014. The alleged terrorist, who at his trial showed he had put on considerable weight since his arrest, denied it was him with the severed head.

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-Qaida 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.