A Swedish man was indicted Tuesday in connection with ISIS’ killing of a Jordanian pilot whose plane went down in Syria on Christmas Eve 2014, prosecutors said.
The 26-year-old Jordanian, 1st Lt. Mu’ath al-Kaseasbeh, was taken captive after his F-16 fighter jet crashed near the extremists’ de facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria. He was forced into a cage that was set on fire, killing him on camera in early 2015.
The suspect was identified by Swedish prosecutors as Osama Krayem, 32, who is alleged to have traveled to Syria in September 2014 to fight for ISIS.
The airman became the first known foreign military pilot to fall into the militants’ hands after the U.S.-led international coalition began its aerial campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq in 2014. Jordan, a close U.S. ally, was a member of the coalition and the pilot’s killing appeared aimed at pressuring the government of Jordan to leave the alliance.
Krayem was charged with “participating in the brutal execution of a pilot” near Raqqa, prosecutor Reena Devgun told a press conference.
AP Photo/Nasser Nasser
Krayem is set to go on trial June 4 in Stockholm. He was previously convicted in France and Brussels for fatal ISIS attacks in those countries.
Video of the killing
In a 20-minute video released in 2015, purportedly showing al-Kaseasbeh’s killing, he displayed signs of having been beaten, including a black eye.
In the video, the victim is seen walking past several masked ISIS fighters, including Krayem, according to prosecutors.
The pilot is then locked in a cage that is set on fire, leading to his death, Henrik Olin, the other prosecutor in charge of the case, told reporters.
“This bestial murder, in which a prisoner was burned alive in a cage, was staged in a carefully produced video that was broadcast around the world. Its publication marked an unprecedented escalation in the Islamic State group’s violent propaganda,” Olin said.
Prosecutors have been unable to determine the exact day of the murder, but the investigation has identified the location where it took place.
The footage was widely released as part of the militant group’s propaganda.
The killing sparked outrage and anti-ISIS demonstrations in Jordan, and King Abdullah II ordered two al Qaeda prisoners to be executed in response.
In 2022, Krayem was among 20 men convicted by a special terrorism court in Paris for involvement in a wave of ISIS attacks in the French capital in 2015, targeting the Bataclan theater, Paris cafés and the national stadium. The assaults killed 130 people and injured hundreds, some permanently maimed.
Krayem was sentenced to 30 years in prison, for charges including complicity to terrorist murder. French media reported that France agreed in March to turn Krayem over to Sweden for nine months, to assist with the Swedish probe and his expected trial.
Sweden is then to return him to France so he can serve out his sentence, French media reported.
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 subway station, the country’s deadliest peacetime attack.
Krayem was aboard the commuter train that was hit, but did not detonate the explosives he was carrying.
Both the Paris and Brussels attacks were linked to the same ISIS network.
“It is painful for my parents to be confronted with this event again, but we are grateful that the Swedish authorities want to give us justice,” Jawdat al-Kasasbeh, the pilot’s brother, told broadcaster Sveriges Radio.
Life in Sweden
Krayem grew up in Rosengard, a district notorious in Sweden for high crime and unemployment rates where more than 80% of the residents are first- or second-generation immigrants.
“He was well-known to the local police for multiple criminal activities like thefts, for instance,” Muhammad Khorshid, who ran a program in Rosengard to help immigrants integrate into Swedish society, told The Associated Press in 2016.
He said Krayem “was the perfect target for radicalization — no job, no future, no money.”
Krayem had posted photos on social media from Syria, including one where he posed with an assault rifle in front of the black flag of ISIS.
Lost territory
At its peak, ISIS ruled an area half the size of the United Kingdom in Iraq and Syria 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. It beheaded civilians, slaughtered 1,700 captured Iraqi soldiers in a short period, and enslaved and raped thousands of women from the Yazidi community, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities.
In March 2019, the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces captured the the last sliver of land the extremists controlled in the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz. While ISIS has lost its hold on all of the territory it once controlled, sleeper cells still stage occasional attacks in Iraq and Syria and abroad.
Arrest in Germany
Also on Tuesday, the German federal prosecutor separately announced the arrest of an alleged member of the Syrian secret intelligence services under former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The suspect, who was only named as Fahad A. in line with German privacy rules, was arrested on suspicion of acts of killing, torture and deprivation of liberty as crimes against humanity.
He allegedly took part in more than 100 interrogations between late April 2011 and mid-April 2012. At least 70 prisoners died from the torture and prison conditions, the federal prosecutor’s office said.
contributed to this report.
