Dad was jailed for terrorism, rapper ISIS son dies in Spanish jail

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary wanted to be a tough-boy London rapper and worried his mum. Then he went online holding a severed head.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary released music videos under the name L. Jinny.

OBITUARY

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary

Islamist militant

Born London, June 16, 1991; died El Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain, July 26, aged 32.

Britain doesn’t just grow Islamic terrorists for its own consumption; it’s quite an export business.

Britain’s homegrown killers included those who conducted the July 7, 2005, London bombings that claimed the lives of 52 people and maimed another 700.

These were carried out by four young men from Leeds. One was a convert who married another convert, Irishwoman Samantha Lewthwaite. She denied her husband was involved, but when made aware of incontrovertible evidence he was a mass killer, said: “I totally condemn and am horrified by the atrocities.”

Unfortunately, many believed her. She is now part of the al-Shabab terror cell in East Africa and reportedly is responsible for 400 murders, including 148 killed in an attack on students at a university in Kenya.

Soldier Lee Rigby was stabbed in a southeast London street by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, who met studying at Greenwich University. Both men had converted to Islam. Research by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism identifies British converts to Islam as more likely to be radicalised.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary as one of the so-called “Beatles” with a severed head.

The UK terror exports include the so-called “Beatles” – a group of black-hearted young men with British accents who tortured Islamic State captives and in 2014 beheaded American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and English ­humanitarian aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning. Other captives who survived said the British terrorists were more brutal than the locals.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary had an unusual start to life. After Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Bary’s father, Adel, and others were rounded up by Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak’s security forces and, Adel said, jailed and tortured.

With the help of Amnesty International, he secured political asylum in Britain and eventually refugee status. It was there that his son was born. When Abdel-Majed was nine, his father – already under surveillance as an al-Qa’ida sympathiser – was held by British authorities in connection with the African embassy bombings. On August 7, 1998, the American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, were attacked – 224 people were killed and almost 5000 injured.

British and US authorities believed Adel was involved and after a tortuous series of court cases and appeals he was eventually extradited to the US, where he pleaded guilty to mass murder.

“I agreed with others … to kill American citizens anywhere in the world – either civilian or military,” he told the judge.

By then, his son was believed to be the ISIS “Beatle” John, who had been filmed beheading Foley. But it was another Londoner, Mohammed Emwazi, who was later eliminated in a US drone attack.

Abdel-Majed grew up in a council house, subsidised by British taxpayers, and his family lived on state benefits and resented having to justify their situation to authorities to keep the payments coming in. Abdel-Majed and his siblings told their mother of the dangers of London life – drugs, decadence, knife crime and truancy. She worried about them.

Calling himself L. Jinny, he tried his luck as a tough-boy London rapper and issued online some songs about drugs and the hardships of council estate life. It was reported that some of them were broadcast on the BBC.

Abdel Majed Abdel Bary from his rapping days.

But in 2013 he “left everything for the sake of Allah” and joined the fighting in Syria. The following year he posted a photo of himself holding a severed head. The Independent newspaper reported that it was captioned “Chillin’ with my homie or what’s left of him”. The following year he was reported to be on the run in Turkey, having fled ISIS. He was arrested in Almeria, in Andalusia, southern Spain, in 2020, after arriving illegally in a dinghy.

Last month, he was put on trial for alleged involvement in terrorist activities, which he denied.

He was found dead in his cell on July 26 and the cause of his death is still being investigated.

Not long after Abdel-Majed was arrested, his father – by now weighing 104kg – appealed to be released based on his failing health and obesity which, he claimed, made him more susceptible to Covid-19 in his New York jail.

A judge agreed and he was sent back to England, which could not refuse him entry because it had once granted him asylum.

His US lawyer told The New York Times: “After all this time, all Mr Bary wants is to enjoy a quiet life with his family.”