Amir EG acknowledges his guilt and the Prosecutor’s Office withdraws the alleged crime of terrorist integration from his initial accusation
A 21-year-old from Alicante, Amir E.G.., has confessed guilty this Monday in the National High Court of the crimes of self-indoctrination and funding terrorism and has accepted a sentence of six years in prison and €1,300 fine after reaching an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, which before the trial had requested 15 years in prison for him and accused him of being a member of the Islamic State.
In the trial, which barely lasted five minutes for the consent agreement between the parties, Amir EG has admitted his guilt to the questions of the court, before which he has admitted being the author of the facts and has settled for the sentence requested by the prosecutor.
Finally, the Prosecutor’s Office has withdrawn from its brief of provisional conclusions the accusation that the young man had joined DAESH and for which he was demanding up to nine years behind bars. However, for the crime of self-indoctrination and self-training, the accused will have to assume, in addition to the finethree and a half years in prison, while for the financing of terrorism, two and a half years.
In addition, the prosecutor has claimed and obtained in agreement between the parties the confiscation of the 700 euros deposited in a PayPal account of the young man, and in which, according to the Public Ministry, he received 104 dollars and 650 euros during the summer of 2020 from different donors, and whose “purpose” was to allocate them “in favor” of DAESH.
For the prosecution, the defendant had self-indoctrinated in jihad by consuming DAESH propaganda and had raised money for terrorist activities. “In the actions of the accused and in his expressions, the total internalization that he makes of the radical jihadist ideology advocated by DAESH, his uncritical adherence to the premises that he proclaims, his desire to praise” the achievements of the organization, according to the conclusion brief provisional.
The defendant, according to the prosecutor, had the predisposition to collaborate “very actively” with DAESH until he was arrested by the Civil Guard in July 2020 and placed in provisional prison. Amir EG helped, explained the prosecutor, to finance the organization “to the extent of his economic possibilities” and published propaganda messages on social networks to “disseminate, praise and justify” terrorism, “pedagogy its postulates in order to incorporate new members” to the ranks of the Islamic State.
“Benefits” of Jihad”
For the Public Ministry, Amir EG assumed as “legitimate, desirable and even praiseworthy” the objectives of DAESH and therefore tried to convince other people of the “goodness” of jihad.
The defendant, always according to the prosecutor’s brief, consumed and disseminated material that praised the actions of DAESH in various accounts on platforms such as Reddit or Archive.org. Also managed hundreds of videos and images about executions and battles of jihadists in Syria, Iraq or Africa. To surf the web, he took security measures such as accessing VPN networks, anonymous browsers such as TOR, a virtual phone number, and clearing the computer’s cache.
Amir EG made “a continuous, rapid and compulsive dissemination of videos, audios and documents related to DAESH, through the different channels he managed, distributing them in various locations on the network and with these movements he multiplied the speed and capacity of dissemination” , at the discretion of the Prosecutor. Those profiles on the Internet registered more than a thousand visitors.
At the time of the arrest, agents of the Civil Guard searched the house of the accused, in San Vicente del Raspeig (Alicante), where they found military clothing, hand drawings of automatic weapons and flags with “war-religious connotations”.
From the analysis of his mobile phone, the agents found conversations with other users on the Instagram network in which the accused said that “soon” he would travel to Iraq, “God willing”while on Telegram he would have sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.
The Prosecutor’s Office also accused him of participating in an international network of raising money to finance jihad. “He carried out money-raising tasks giving instructions to his interlocutors on how to send money to third parties in Turkey or to the Al-Hawi camp, located in northeast Syria, about 120 kilometers from the border with Iraq” and where some 64,000 were interned. people, including wives of DAESH members, he said.