Baladi News
A teenage Isis recruit from Coventry can be revealed as the first Briton to be executed by the terrorist group as a spy.
Mohammed Ismail, nicknamed Osama bin Bieber because of his youthful looks, was murdered after confessing to giving away the tightly guarded movements of Nasser Muthana, an aspiring doctor from Cardiff who became a leading Isis recruiter and propagandist.
Muthana, who had been on a Pentagon “kill list”, was eliminated by a precision strike in a street in Mosul, Isis’s former stronghold in Iraq. A jihadist from Australia was also killed in the attack.
Details of Ismail’s suspected betrayal have been disclosed to The Sunday Times by a senior member of the Isis security apparatus, and corroborated by other sources.
The method of execution is not known, but Isis has previously killed spies by beheading or by shooting them in the back of the head.
According to one account, Ismail’s death in Raqqa, the former Isis capital in Syria, was filmed as a warning to would-be traitors.
“He [Ismail] got captured in Raqqa,” said the Isis security source. “They did an interrogation with him. He confessed everything. And then they killed him.”
The execution is believed to have happened in late 2016, a few months after the strike on Muthana.
Ismail was only 18 when he and two teenage friends from Coventry travelled to Syria to join the terrorist group in March 2014. The media quickly nicknamed the baby-faced youth after Justin Bieber, the Canadian pop star.
His friends were both killed in fighting that year. Ismail was wounded and later deployed as an Isis police officer. But his fate has remained unknown until now.
Source: The Sunday Times.