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Suspected Spanish Isis recruiter arrested in Belgium

Belgian police arrested a Spanish man suspected of recruiting for the Islamic State group and planning attacks in Belgium, in a raid near Brussels airport on Wednesday, officials said.

Published: 27 September 2017 16:45 CEST

Suspected Spanish Isis recruiter arrested in Belgium

File image of Police officials stand alert on a street outside Gare Centrale in Brussels on June 20th 2017 after an explosion in the Belgian capital. Photo: AFP

Officers, acting on a request from Madrid, swooped on the man's home in the city's Zavantem district, Belgian prosecutors said.

The Zavantem airport was targeted by a deadly Isis-claimed double suicide bombing last year.

The 26-year-old Spaniard, who has not been named, is suspected of leading a network of “recruitment and indoctrination from his home and in Brussels cafes”, Spanish police said in a statement.

Unable to travel to Iraq or Syria with his brother to join the ranks of Isis fighters, the suspect planned “terrorist acts in Europe, particularly in Belgium”, Spanish police said, adding that “specific targets” had been identified, including locations, buildings and groups of people.

He is also accused of showing other members of the cell “videos of suicide bombings, executions, death sentences and calls for terrorist attacks in Europe,” the statement said.

Belgian police held the man under a European arrest warrant issued by a judge in Spain who has been investigating the cell for several years.

Four other members of the cell are already behind bars, three in Spain and one in Morocco.

The Belgian federal prosecutor said the suspect would be extradited to Spain, as he was not currently wanted by the authorities in Belgium.

READ ALSO: Who are Spain's jihadists?

Ex-jihadi housewife jailed in Norway for joining IS

The Kurdish-run al-Hol camp which holds suspected relatives of Islamic State fighters.Photo: Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

The Oslo court sentenced the Norwegian-Pakistani woman to three and a half years in prison for “participating in a terrorist organisation” by taking care of her household and enabling her three husbands to fight.

“By travelling to an area controlled by IS in Syria… by moving in and living with her husbands, taking care of the children and various tasks at home, the defendant enabled her three husbands to actively participate in IS fighting,” judge Ingmar Nilsen said as he read out the verdict.

Being a housewife to three successive husbands did not render her a passive bystander, the judge said.

“On the contrary, she was a supporter who enabled the jihad, looked after her three husbands at home and raised the new generation of IS recruits,” he said.

The young woman, who admitted having “radical ideas” at the time, left for Syria in early 2013 to join an Islamist fighter, Bastian Vasquez, who was fighting the regime.

Although she did not take up arms herself, she was accused of having allowed her husbands to go fight while taking care of her two children and household chores.

The trial was the first prosecution in Norway of someone who had returned after joining IS.

“This is a special case,” prosecutor Geir Evanger acknowledged during the trial.

“This is the first time that, to put it bluntly, someone has been charged for being a wife and mother.”

The prosecution had called for a four-year sentence, while the defence had called for her acquittal and immediately appealed Tuesday’s verdict.

The woman’s lawyer, Nils Christian Nordhus, argued that his client had quickly wanted to leave Syria after being subjected to domestic violence.

She had also been a victim of human trafficking because she had been held against her will, he added.

But the judge stressed that she had participated in the organisation “knowingly” and of her own will.

The woman was repatriated to Norway in early 2020 on humanitarian grounds with her two children, including a young boy described as seriously ill.

At least four other Norwegian women and their children are being held in Kurdish-controlled camps in Syria.

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