A suspect in the beheading of American journalist James Foley is a British-raised rapper who left his parent’s million-dollar London home last year to fight for radical Islam in Syria.
Homegrown jihadist Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a 23-year-old rapper, may be the masked man who severed Foley’s head with a knife in a YouTube video in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes on ISIS in Iraq, according to reports in several British papers.
Bary left his family’s $1-million-plus home west of London last year to fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and once posted a Twitter photo of himself holding a severed head.
“The MI5 (British intelligence agency) investigation into the man behind James Foley’s murder is ongoing, but they have managed to identify the masked British jihadist who can be seen in the video holding a knife to his throat,” a police intelligence source told The Sunday Times of London.
The British ambassador to the United States, Peter Westmacott, said investigators aren’t ready to name Bary as the killer, but are getting “close” to identifying the killer, he said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Bary is one of six children of Adel Abdul Bary, an Egyptian militant who is facing terrorism charges in connection with Al Qaeda’s twin 1998 bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.
After spending years in and out of Egyptian prisons, subjected to torture, the elder Bary and his wife, Ragaa, were granted political asylum in Britain in 1993. He was arrested for the bombings in 1998 and was extradited to the United States in 2012 after a protracted legal battle.
Ragaa’s story is told in the book, “Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Woman of the War on Terror.”
The younger Bary rapped under the name L. Jinny or Lyricist Jinn Matic, and his songs had been featured on the BBC’s Radio 1 Extra, media outlets reported.
In one freestyle rap posted on his Facebook page, he talks about being addicted to alcohol and crack. But he also speaks of his venom toward the West.
“The day when they came and took my dad, I could have killed a cop or two when I went to look back,” he rapped. “Imagine then I was only 6, picture what I’d do now with a loaded stick.”
Referring to his mother, he rapped, “You always knew what’s best for me, I hope I die before I see you rest in peace.”
In July 2013, he posted on Facebook, “The Unknown mixtape with my bro tabanacle will be the last music I’m ever releasing. I have left everything for the sake of Allah.”
On Aug. 13, he tweeted a photo of himself in Iraq holding a severed head with the caption, “Chilllin’ with my homie or what’s left of him,” The Times of London reported. His Twitter account was suspended soon afterward. It is unclear whose head he was holding.
Bary also tweeted a threat in June: “The lions are coming for you soon you filthy kuffs (infidels). Beheadings in your own backyard soon.”
In March, Bary claimed on Twitter that he and another British jihadist were kidnapped, tortured and robbed by members of a rival terrorist group, according to the Daily Mail.
ISIS hostages referred to him and several other militants with British accents as “the Beatles.”
The black-masked man who beheaded Foley in a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday had a distinct British accent.
Some 500 Brits have traveled to the Middle East to join the terrorist group, Westmacott said, calling it “a betrayal of all that we stand for.”
Federal officials have estimated that at least 100 Americans could be fighting with Sunni extremists who have seized territory throughout eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq.
U.S. lawmakers joined in sounding the alarm about the threat from the radicalized terrorists — especially the many foreign fighters with American and European passports who could easily travel to the West.
“They are one plane ticket away from U.S. shores,” Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on “Meet the Press.”
The Michigan Republican said the number of militants with Western documents is “much higher” than the estimate of 2,000 that has been reported.
“They get new recruits every single day,” he said. “If that’s a British citizen, we believe it was . . . that individual goes back home and . . . buys one plane ticket, they’re in the United States.
“We may or may not know who that individual is. That’s what’s so dangerous about this, and why we can’t let them continue unabated,” Rogers said.
Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the militants “present the greatest threat we’ve seen since 9/11.”
“This has been festering for the last year and now it’s culminating with the killing and the beheading of an American journalist, which I think is a turning point,” the Texas Republican said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The American people — it has sort of opened their eyes to what ISIS really is . . . how savage they really are, and their intent to harm Americans.”
The FBI and Homeland Security Department issued a bulletin to local law enforcement Friday saying there are no specific or credible threats to U.S. soil from the militant group, in retaliation for intensified airstrikes in Iraq.
With News Wire Services
