A Terrorist Cell Creates YouTube Channels To Recruit Fighters

Trial of a terrorist cell that is consisting of 11 people, one of them in escape, before Algiers Dar Bida criminal court, on Sunday, revealed serious facts and how they recruited youth to join terrorist organizations that are operating outside the country through using information and communication technologies, and secret meetings inside Al-Fath Mosque in Boudouaou and Al Wafa Bilahd mosque in Kouba (Algiers), and the use of the “telegram” to communicate with youth.

Facts of the case, based on the trial of the defendants, dates back to March 2017 following the leak of information regarding the activity of a suspicious person called B.H, and his relationship with the largest terrorist organizations in the region of Al-Sham and Iraq “ISIS”, and that he is at the head of a cell to recruit fighters.

Police services launched an intensive investigation on three arrested, based on their statements, while the judicial police began their investigations to arrest the rest of them, and it became clear during the course of the investigation that four defendants met in the Holy Sites, including B.H, who was employed in Makkah after the expiration of his visa during performing Umrah, then he became a hotel reservation officer.

Their stay in Saudi Arabia continued for a period intending to coordinate the terrorist acts and connect the contacts with their partners in Algeria, especially in the Thenea area in Boumerdes (eastern Algeria), as the technical expertise that was conducted on the devices of the accused during their arrest show that they communicated among themselves using the Telegram because of its advantage in ensuring confidentiality from security surveillance, and the use of electronic channels as an information platform to disseminate extremist ideas about the alleged “Jihad” using strange names such as “You are the group, even if you are alone”, and the channel “Oh Allah Give Me More Knowledge” and the other names like “Be careful to prevent break your right”, as the accused shared videos of sabotage and industry of explosives through their electronic accounts.

It was also revealed that they had planned earlier to hit security headquarters and sensitive locations in the state of Boumerdes and the assassination of the head of security. In addition, it became clear after the correspondence of the border police system regarding their movements abroad that they moved to Italy and Tunisia, and mostly to the holy sites at different periods between 2012 and 2017.

The main suspect “B.H” revealed, before the surprised audience, at the hearing, that he was a secret agent of the Algerian intelligence and was active under the guidance of known and senior military in favor of Algeria, and they allowed his Chechen wife to enter the Algerian territory even though she was wanted by the Russian intelligence, after the killing of her first husband, who is a well-known Chechen leader, and she sought refuge in Azerbaijan before their marriage.

He justified his relationship with her as a mere sympathy for her cause and admiration for her jihadist struggle, and then he denied his accusation of supporting terrorist elements in the world. However, the court faced the accused that his wife was the one who offered him the marriage and their relationship was the beginning of the activity of the terrorist cell from the holy sites and Turkey, and that the accused himself had been an active element in Chechnya through material and moral support and incursions into its organizations since 2008. At the end of the trial the prosecutor had sought ten years in prison against him.