A man has been found guilty of travelling to Syria to fight with a terrorist group linked to al Qaida for jihad.

Isa Giga, 32, resigned from his job as a technical support consultant job at a technology firm and bought a business class return flight to Turkey before crossing into war-torn Syria in August 2015.

Despite pleas from his family, Giga did not return to the UK for nine years and was arrested upon his arrival on a flight from Turkey last May.

Following a trial at the Old Bailey, he was found guilty of preparation of terrorist acts between August 31 2015 and August 31 2016 by travelling to Syria to fight with the Jaysh Al Fath groups.

The court heard how Giga had left the home he shared with his parents and sister in Hounslow, west London, in August 2015 and informed them he had gone to Syria for jihad.

On September 11 2015 – the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States – he told his sister: “I have come here to fight for jihad. I’m based in Idlib province and I fight for Jaysh al Fath which is the rebel coalition which includes the Free Syrian Army up to al Qaida-linked groups.

“I have come here to fight against (Bashar) Assad and also to fight against Isis. I can’t sit at home when fellow Muslims are in need and their religion is in danger.”

His father responded: “Please don’t do anything that will break my or your mother’s or family’s heart, stay within the bounds of true Islam and humanity, stay away from extremism and follow the Sunnah.”

But in a further message to his sister, Giga said he had finished his training and had been given the “opportunity to fight on the front line in the near future”.

He told her: “I hope more than anything to gain martyrdom while fighting against Isis or against the Assad regime but I fear death as much as anyone else so I am in need of your duas (prayers).”

The court heard that Giga’s father did everything he could to try to convince his son to return home and travelled to Reyhanli, a small Turkish town close to the Syrian border.

In a letter to Giga from the border, he wrote: “I have promısed your mum that somehow I will try my best to convince you to come out of there, and we will settle down anywhere in this world where you feel comfortable and happy…

“Can you for one minute imagine what the rest of her life will be like if something was to happen to you? Isa, her life wıll be destroyed and so will all of ours.

“It is on that basis I beg you to stay safe and come out of there immediately. And stay away from the front line because the Russians are using all kınds of firepower.”

However, Giga appeared to be set on “martyrdom”, the court heard.

Then in December 2015, Giga told his sister that he planned on doing charity work – although the organisation concerned had no record of it – and by August 2016 contact with his family petered out.

Eight years later, Giga was issued an emergency passport by the British Consulate in Istanbul.

Police were waiting when Giga arrived at Heathrow Airport on a Turkish Airlines flight on May 23 2024.

Following his arrest, Giga made no comment in police interviews but in a prepared statement denied he had travelled to Syria to fight or join any groups.

He claimed he had lied to his family about doing charity work, training, fighting and joining groups because he thought they would struggle to understand the idea of going there simply to live.

Giving evidence in his Old Bailey trial, Giga maintained that he had gone to Syria only to live in an Islamic state.

A jury deliberated for 10 hours and 26 minutes to reject his version of events and find him guilty by a majority of 11 to one.

Judge Mark Lucraft KC ordered a report and adjourned sentencing to October 17.

Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “We have been clear for some time now that anyone returning to the UK suspected of being involved in any terrorist-related activity overseas will be thoroughly investigated.

“We work very closely with other partners and agencies here in the UK and overseas in order to do this and help keep the public safe.

“As this case shows, we will always arrest those who return to the UK after fighting for a terrorist group, no matter how long it has been since they left the country.”

Former Defence Forces soldier Lisa Smith married a member of al Qaida and stayed in a “bombed-out” house where militia and rebels held meetings when she was in Syria, her trial has heard.

The Co Louth woman, 39, has pleaded not guilty to charges of membership of the illegal organisation, the so-called Islamic State, and of providing funds to benefit the group.

Giving evidence on Thursday, Tanya Joya told the Special Criminal Court that she and her then-husband John Georgealis had met the accused through his Islamic Facebook group We Hear, We Obey.

Ms Joya, originally from London, was born a Muslim and said she had become “radicalised” after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001.

She met Mr Georgealis, a US man who converted to Islam, online and the pair subsequently married, and travelled to numerous Muslim countries.

They met Smith in Turkey in 2013, but crossed the border into Syria when they were unable to find housing due to an influx of refugees into the country.

Ms Joya told the court that Ms Smith was “excited” to be in Syria, and that she had told her she was planning to die there and become a martyr.

She told the court she was initially happy to meet Smith because she “seemed nice” and was able to help her with her four children.

But she said that shortly after Smith arrived in Turkey “it got a bit ugly”.

She said: “She wanted to go to Syria.

“All Muslims felt an obligation to help the rebels, because they were being oppressed.

“They were brainwashed into thinking if you became a martyr you get to go to paradise.

“Who wouldn’t want that?”

Ms Joya said they had respected Smith “because she had training in the army”, and “she wanted to hep the rebels”.

She added: “Lisa Marie wanted to go to Syria.

“She was determined, it was her goal.

“I was opposed to it because I was afraid.

“I didn’t want to go into a war-zone with my kids.”

The court heard that while Ms Joya was fearful about the war, her husband and Smith would “crack jokes about how close we were to Syria”.

She said the trip “wasn’t planned”, but because they were unable to get housing in Turkey they had taken an overnight bus into Syria.

“John promised it was only for a couple of weeks. We stayed in a building that was bombed out, it was owned by a Syrian general,” she said.

Ms Joya said the house had no electricity, the windows had been smashed, there were bullet holes in the walls and that it was “very dirty”.

She added: “It was where the militia, the rebels had meetings.

“People entering the country would stay there.”

She said they had stayed there for one week, before they went to stay “with a really fanatical Syrian women” at another location.

It was here that Smith met a Tunisian man named Ahmed, a member of al Qaida, who she wanted to marry.

Ms Joya told the court that she had advised Smith to marry for her own protection.

However, she said she was opposed to her marrying Ahmed because they did not know each other or speak the same language.

“I didn’t like it that Lisa Marie wanted to marry Ahmed.

“I thought it was batsh*t crazy” she said.

She said of Smith that “everyone loved her”, while Ahmed was “handsome and charming.”

Asked why she thought Smith wanted to marry him, Ms Joya replied: “Because he was hot, that’s why.

“And he was a fighter.”

“She didn’t know him, but he had a cute smile and he was very shy,” she added.

Ms Joya told the court the pair got married in Syria, but that she had refused to attend.

“She knew I thought it was ridiculous. She didn’t care. To her I wasn’t a good Muslim, and I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be a Muslim,” she said.

Ms Joya told the court that around this time she got her hands on a “burner” mobile phone, called her husband’s mother and told her to report him to the FBI.

She made plans to leave Syria and Smith asked her if she planned to tell the authorities about her.

“I said yes, I had to,” Ms Joya told the court.

“She just shrugged.

“She didn’t argue with me.

“She knew I was going to do what I had to do.”

She said Smith had blocked her on Facebook after that conversation.

She said the accused stayed in Syria when she made her journey back to the UK, and then to the US.

“She (Smith) was not going to leave. It was never her intention to leave. I didn’t care.

“It was like, good riddance. I just wanted to look after my kids,” she said.

Ms Joya told told the court she believed Smith had been “indoctrinated”.

“She was told what to think.

“She obeyed because she believed in God” she added.

The case received widespread attention in 2019 when it emerged that Smith, a former Air Corps soldier who had worked on the Government jet, had been detained in Syria over alleged links to IS.

Smith was arrested at Dublin Airport in 2019 on suspicion of terrorist offences after returning from Turkey in November with her young daughter.

She had travelled to Syria a number of years ago after she converted to Islam.

Smith is charged under Section Six of the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act 2005 which makes it an offence to join a foreign unlawful organisation.

It is alleged that between October 28 2015 and December 1 2019 at a location outside the State, she was a member of a terrorist group styling itself as the Islamic State.

She has also been accused of financing terrorism by sending 800 euro (£670) in assistance by Western Union money transfer to a named individual in 2015.

The trial will resume at 10.30 am on Friday.

Spanish police who arrested a former London rapper allegedly turned fighter for so-called Islamic State in Syria, say they have no evidence he was planning an attack in Europe, but his illegal entry raises suspicions about his motivation.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, whose father was convicted in the US of involvement in al Qaida bombings, was one of Europe’s most wanted foreign IS fighters and “extremely dangerous” according to Spanish police.

The 29-year-old was arrested on Monday with two more suspects in the southern coastal city of Almeria.

A National Police anti-terrorism expert involved in the arrests told The Associated Press that if Abdel Bary had repented he would have sought a legitimate way of returning to Europe.

“The fact that he used clandestine means and a middleman in the illegal migration network doesn’t fit the profile of somebody who wants to normalise his return,” said the investigator.

“At this point, we have no evidence on whether he was planning to stay in Spain or continue his trip,” he added. “We also don’t know what his ultimate goal was.”

Experts on religious extremism had raised worries that Abdel Bary could be part of a dormant cell or an agent in touch with other radicals in Europe.

“He was a nasty guy but it’s been five years since he disappeared, we don’t know what he was up to,” said Olivier Guitta, director of GlobalStrat, a geopolitical risk consultancy based in London.

“Is this guy coming into Europe with an idea of committing attacks? Or is he a reformed Jihadist? If he came back for an operation, that is a new game (which) puts everything in shambles.”

Police found Abdel Bary at 3am on Monday in an Almeria rented apartment that he shared with his two companions.

One of them is Abdeizerrak Seddiki, a 28-year-old Algerian known to Spanish law enforcement as a human trafficker. The third suspect is yet to be identified, police said.

The three declined to answer questions from police and from a National Court judge who sent them to a jail near Madrid on Wednesday while a probe continues on their possible links to terrorist organisations. No country has issued international arrest warrants against them.

Abdel Bary, who carried no documents at the time of his arrest, was stripped of his British citizenship when he allegedly joined the IS in 2013.

He has Egyptian nationality and his Egyptian father, Abdel Abdul Bary, is serving a 25-year prison sentence in the US for his role in the 1998 al Qaida bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.

Known as Lyricist Jinn and L Jinny in the London rap scene of the early 2010s, Abdel Bary went on to post online images of himself holding a severed head.

In 2015, he publicly declared on social media that he was abandoning the Islamic State and allegedly hid in Turkey.

The Duke of Sussex was branded a “race traitor” and pictured with a gun to his head in an image posted online by an extremist teenager.

The image of Harry, against a blood-spattered background and featuring a swastika, was shared on a far-right social media platform last year.

Michal Szewczuk, who is being sentenced for two counts of encouraging terrrorism and five counts of possession of terrorist material, searched “Meghan Markle”, “Prince Harry” and “pointing gun” before creating the image and sharing it in August.

It included the phrase “See Ya Later Race Traitor”.

The 19-year-old, of Wyther Park in Bramley, Leeds, sipped water and gave no reaction in the dock at the Old Bailey, while quotes from his blog justifying the rape of women and children to further an Aryan race were read aloud to the court.

He is being sentenced alongside Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, 18, for encouraging terrorism by posting images or links to Gab, a social media platform which attracts mainly far-right users, last summer.

Dunn-Koczorowski, whose posts included support for far-right terrorist Anders Breivik and the threat of ethnic cleansing of Albanians, demonstrated a “highly radicalised and violent mindset”, the court heard.

Prosecutor Naomi Parsons said the posts, made across three accounts by the two teenagers “convey a message of the threat of and/or use of serious violence against others, in order to advance a political, ideological and racial cause (neo-Nazism) and in this way encourage terrorism”.

She told the court targets included Jewish people, non-white people and anyone “perceived to be complicit in the perpetuation of multi-culturalism”.

Dunn-Koczorowski, 18, from St Albans Avenue in west London, is being sentenced for two counts of encouraging terrorism.

Szewczuk, who was arrested in December at his halls of residence during his first year studying computer science at Portsmouth University, pleaded guilty in April to possession of documents including the White Resistance Manual and the al Qaida Manual.

Dunn-Koczorowski, who was arrested at his west London home on the same day last year, admitted the charges against him in December.

The sentencing continues.

A Somali Muslim had numerous Islamic State and al Qaida magazines on electronic devices, including articles on how to carry out terrorist attacks using vehicles and knives to create “a trail of carnage”, a court heard.

Police seized two laptops, a mobile phone and a USB memory stick after searching the home of Abdirahman Mohamed in Middlesex in July 2017, prosecutors said.

Once the equipment was forensically analysed, officers found electronic copies of al Qaida magazine Inspire and Islamic State magazine Rumiyah, as well as other documents including “safety and security guidelines for Lone Wolf Mujahideen”, the court heard.

A jury of seven women and five men at the Old Bailey heard on Thursday that Mohamed had also sent a link via a chat room to an 11-minute video created by Islamic State which included images of fighters, burning bodies and executions.

The 42-year-old denies 10 counts of possessing a document or record for terrorist purposes all dating between July 2011 and July 2017, and one count of disseminating terrorist publications in March 2016.

Prosecutor Kelly Brocklehurst said while Mohamed was not engaged in violence he possessed documents likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

Mr Brocklehurst added: “It is not the Crown’s case that the defendant personally engaged in, or was about to engage in, violence to kill or maim people in a political, ideological or religious cause.

“Rather the Crown say he knowingly possessed a number of documents that the Crown say are the kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

“This defendant provided a service to another, enabling them to look at a terrorist publication.”

Mr Brocklehurst told the jury Mohamed had two electronic copies of al Qaida’s Inspire on a Toshiba laptop, which included articles called “destroying buildings” and “training with the AK 2”.

The court also heard Mohamed, of Shadwell Drive, Northolt, London, had copies of Rumiyah on a Samsung Galaxy mobile phone and a USB stick containing a series articles named “just terror tactics”.

These focused on vehicle attacks, knife attacks and hostage taking, and talked about causing “as much carnage and terror as possible” and leaving behind a “trail of carnage”.

Mr Brocklehurst said: “The contents of the magazines in particular provide worrying articles with useful tips and guidance on how those who are maybe contemplating carrying out a terrorist attack could achieve their aim.”

The jury was told Mohamed would exchange messages with people while visiting chat rooms under the name Concerned Muslim.

Mr Brocklehurst said Mohamed had used the chat room service to send the link to the Islamic State video in March 2016.

He told the court the video showed IS fighters, burning bodies and imagery linked to executions.

Mr Brocklehurst said Mohamed also sent messages to people through the chat rooms suggesting he was “sympathetic” to Islamic State.

He added: “Some messages show this defendant is not just someone who is curious or just interested in what’s happening in Somalia and what Islamic State is doing and what Al-Shabaab is doing but messages that the Crown say show he is someone who supports and is sympathetic to their aims.”

Mr Brocklehurst said Mohamed gave no comment when interviewed by police but provided a prepared written statement which said: “I am a Somali Muslim, my community had been affected by terrorism.

“The document was to help me understand the issues involved and for my own general interest and for me to form a view on what is happening.”

The trial continues.