Sweden charges man over 2015 killing of Jordanian pilot burned alive
Swedish prosecutors have charged a convicted terrorist over the 2015 killing of a Jordanian pilot who was burned alive in Syria by the so-called Islamic State (IS) group.
Osama Krayem — a 32-year-old Swedish citizen — was charged on Tuesday with aggravated war crimes and terrorism relating to the killing of Jordanian air force pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh.
"Krayem, together with and in agreement with other perpetrators belonging to IS, killed/deprived Muath al-Kasasbeh of his life," the Swedish Prosecution Authority said in his indictment.
Krayem was previously convicted of involvement in fatal attacks by the IS group in Paris in 2015 and in Brussels in 2016, and is currently serving a 30-year jail sentence in France. He has been temporarily transferred to Sweden to participate in the Swedish investigation and is expected to go on trial in Stockholm on 4 June.
The suspect's lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment. Krayem has previously denied the charges, according to Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
The IS group took al-Kasasbeh captive in December 2014 after his F-16 fighter jet crashed near the group's then de facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria. In early 2015, the group released a video of al-Kasasbeh being burned alive in a cage. His death was confirmed by Jordan.
The Swedish prosecutors' indictment said that Krayem had forced the pilot into the cage.
"The cage was subsequently set on fire by one of the co-perpetrators, and the pilot died as a consequence of the fire," the prosecutors said.
Krayem grew up in the Swedish city of Malmö and is believed to have travelled to Syria in September 2014 to fight for the IS group. He had posted photos on social media from Syria, including one where he posed with an assault rifle in front of the group's black flag.
In 2022, Krayem was among 20 men convicted by a special terrorism court in Paris over a wave of IS attacks in the French capital in 2015, targeting several locations, including the Bataclan theatre. The assaults killed 130 people and injured hundreds.
Krayem was jailed for 30 years for charges including complicity to terrorist murder.
In 2023, a Belgian court sentenced Krayem, among others, to life in prison on charges of terrorist murder in connection with 2016 suicide bombings that killed 32 people and wounded hundreds at Brussels airport and a busy metro station.
Krayem was aboard the commuter train that was attacked, but he did not detonate the explosives he was carrying.
At its peak, IS controlled swathes of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017 and was notorious for its brutality — much of it directed against fellow Sunni Muslims as well as against those the group deemed to be heretics.
In March 2019, the US-backed and Kurdish-led fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces captured the last sliver of land ruled by the IS group in the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz.
While the group has lost its hold on all of the territory it once controlled, sleeper cells still stage occasional attacks in Iraq and Syria and abroad.
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