Jihadi stripped of British citizenship ‘robbed banks with Bitcoin scam to fund terror cell

A London-raised jihadist who posted pictures of himself with a severed head in Syria before being stripped of his British citizenship is to go on trial in Spain on charges of belonging to the Islamic State, The Telegraph has has learned.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 32, was arrested in Almería, southern Spain, in April 2020 along with two other alleged IS members.

On Friday, the Spanish public prosecutor issued charges, seen by The Telegraph, accusing Bary and the two others of belonging to a terror organisation. It did not set a date for the trial. The charges were brought late last year, but have not been reported outside of Spain until now.

An aspiring rapper brought up in Maida Vale, west London, Bary had joint British-Egyptian citizenship until he travelled to Syria in 2013.

He had his British citizenship stripped by the UK Government after he posted selfies on social media of him holding a severed head in Raqqa, the IS caliphate’s capital at the time. The 32-year-old was last seen in Turkey in 2015 and then disappeared until he was arrested in Spain in 2020, a week after he and his two Algerian companions entered Europe posing as economic migrants in a boat from the coast of the North African country.

Bary, Abderrazak Seddiki and Kossaila Chollouah were tracked down in a tourism rental apartment by Spanish police and the CNI secret service agency.

According to evidence found in the apartment and on their mobile phones, the three men had formed a cell in Turkey sometime in or shortly after 2015. According to the indictment, Bary used bitcoin to buy stolen payment card information on the dark web, which the group then used to defraud banks. . . It is not clear how much money the group had defrauded in total.

Bary’s father is Adel Abdul Bary, an Egyptian Islamist extremist who was extradited to the US and jailed for his role in the 1998 terror attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that claimed 123 lives.