Disability pensioner guilty of helping seven would-be jihadis get to Syria
A DISABILITY support pensioner who has two wives has been found guilty of recruiting and assisting seven wannabe jihadists to go to Syria to fight.
Hamdi Alqudsi, 41, of Palestinian-origin, stood expressionless while a jury foreman announced “guilty” to the first six counts of recruiting people to fight in Syria.
Alqudsi pleaded not guilty to seven counts of recruiting the men with the intention of facilitating their entry into Syria for hostile activity between June and November 2013. The offence carries a maximum penalty of 10 years jail for each count.
Six of the men made it to Syria and two of the men, Tyler Casey and Caner Temel, died fighting for opposing Islamist rebel groups.
Casey and his wife Amira Karroum were with al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra when they were killed by Islamic State fighters in January 2014 while Temel was killed in the same month fighting for Islamic State.
It took six hours for the 12-person jury to find Alqudsi guilty of the first six charges.
About an hour later, the jury delivered its seventh verdict finding Alqudsi guilty of helping Nassim Elbahsa travel to Syria to fight with Islamic State.
Alqudsi remained seated during the verdict and showed know reaction.
His defence barrister Scott Corish asked Justice Christine Adamson for the sentence to be adjourned for them to get a medical report on his back problems.
A sentence hearing was set down for August 22 and Alqudsi will be sentenced on September 1.
The jury is continuing to deliberate on the seventh count in relation to a man called Nassim Elbahsa who was allegedly the last person Alqudsi helped get to Syria to fight in 2013.
During the two week trial the jury heard intercepted phone calls and read transcripts of social media conversations between Alquidsi, the alleged recruits and Australia’s most senior IS member in Syria, Mohammed Ali Baryalei, who said he wanted “to open the door for the rest of the boys.”
The phone calls revealed Alqudsi organised the travel plans of the men to fly to Istanbul, in Turkey, and then on to the border province of Hatay where they would be smuggled into Syria and brought to “Abu Omar” the nickname for Baryalei.
During the conversation he used codes sometimes calling the men “soccer players,” or referring to battles as “operations or surgeries.”
In one phone call Alqudsi told a recruit Amin Mohamed that he had just received a message from, “the boys”.
“There’s a big, big surgery, big, big operation coming up involving 1500 brothers and the Emir said their may be a very big number of them that may attain martyrdom ... you guys better start pushing before the front lines are full.”
In one phone call Baryalei, a former Kings Cross bouncer and extra on TV series Underbelly: The Golden Mile, tells Alqudsi he has decided that “the boys” will join up with IS and move from “the front” (Jabhat al-Nusra).
Another conversation with Baryalei reveals the jihadi’s state of mind after a battle in which he saw his “Emir” (commander) was killed “right in front of our eyes.”
“I don’t want to be here man, I’m over it, I’m over it,” Baryalei says and then begins to cry.
Baryalei is believed to have died in 2014.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...a/news-story/a7d2ffd5c8ebd520680da4880f897062
