Mohamed El Gharbia jihadist sentenced to more than seven years in prison by the National Court, escaped from Spain.
This is stated in the documentation to which EL ESPAÑOL had exclusive access: a resolution of the Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber. —dated this same Wednesday, orders the Security Forces and Corps to try to locate him— and a report from the Prosecutor’s Office which alerts the court to this circumstance.
“The prisoner He removed the electronic tracking device without anyone noticing and left Spanish territory without anyone stopping him.; all this, despite the prohibitions imposed by this House,” reads the aforementioned resolution, which orders the police to investigate how this event could have occurred.
The resolution of the National Court which includes the escape of El Gharbi.
El Gharbi was one of those condemned by the so-called in front of the jihadist prisona group of prisoners who praised the Islamic State through the letters they clandestinely exchanged while behind bars. They also attempted to unite the recipients of these letters under the precepts of radical Islam.
The one considered to be the leader of this network, Mohamed Ashraf also flees Spain since at least December 2023. As this newspaper revealed, the police searched for him, without success, in his native country, Moroccoafter having already done so in France.
There are therefore already two of the accused in this case who fled, sooner or later, Spain.
The “prison front”
The legal journey of in front of the jihadist prison It’s special. They were tried the first time and acquitted. All. The Prosecutor’s Office appealed this conviction and the National Court ordered the court to prepare a second judgment, due to the contradictions of the first.
However, the second sentence also exonerated the accused. The prosecution once again disputed this. And the Appeals Chamber of the National Court ordered the trial to be repeated.
Finally, the Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber convicted Mohamed El Gharbi and Karim Abdeselam Mohamed. And he acquitted the third accused, Abdelah Abdeselam Ahmed. Mohamed Achraf, the group’s leader, was not tried on this second occasion, because he had already fled Spain.
But why did El Gharbi flee now? Judicial sources tell EL ESPAÑOL that he appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. Having already served the maximum four years that the law allows for pre-trial detention, he was released, but with a monitoring bracelet, while waiting for the High Court to rule.
As indicated in the documentation in possession of this newspaper, the jihadist removed this bracelet and is no longer in Spain.
The conviction
Why was he ultimately convicted? in front of the jihadist prison? In its third judgment, the only condemnatory one, the National Court considered it proven that El Gharbi and Karim Abdeselam “took the decision to unite the detainees incarcerated for crimes linked to jihadist terrorism and to lead them so that they would not “do not abandon the said ideology”.
They did this through letters smuggled to various prisons between 2014 and 2019. The two defendants were found guilty of the offenses of terrorist recruitment and indoctrination, with the aggravating circumstance of recidivism, but not of collaboration with an organization terrorist, which the public prosecutor attributed. to them.
Facade of the National Court.
The purpose of these letters was for their recipients to act “according to common guidelines, which included remaining strong and united during their time in prison, that none of them would be tempted to abandon armed jihad (…) nor relax in respecting their obligations as jihadists, to continue the fight once freed.”
In addition to El Gharbi and Abdeselam Mohamed, a third defendant, Abdelah Abdeselam Ahmed, was tried for these facts, the only one to be exonerated. The court acquitted him, because, although the judgment recognized that the letters he had sent contained “warlike content” and “rigorous from a religious point of view”, “emblems or drawings of the terrorist organization Daesh /Islamic State which allow us to affirm, without any allusion there is no doubt that with them they wanted to instruct other detainees with the aim of committing acts of a terrorist nature.
Links with ETA
The only two condemned are therefore Mohamed El Gharbi and Karim Abdeselam. The sentence also included the links of the leader of this group, the escaped Achraf, with certain ETA prisonerswith whom he coincided in prison.
In fact, the terminology in front of the prison It is similar to that used by the pro-ETA community for its prisoners. “It is very likely that this would have been known [de los condenados] due to the accused rebel’s long-standing contacts [Mohamed Achraf] with detainees of the aforementioned terrorist organization [ETA]”, said the conviction.
So much so that El Gharbi even started a hunger strike on January 19, 2016, in the same way that “previously, he had done the accused rebel [Achraf]as an instrument of pressure, just as the detainees of the terrorist organization ETA did.”
Ashraf’s escape
Ashraf’s escape was not his first. Previously, he fled Spain on December 17, 2002 and the Central Investigation Court number 5 of the National Court ordered his arrest.
Acharf, in an image from 2005, during his extradition.
He was finally arrested in Switzerland and handed over for trial in October 2005. He was sentenced in 2008 to 14 years in prison for leading another terrorist group, with whose members he had developed a plan to blow up the same terrorist group. national court with explosives, which would later convict him for this purpose.
When the events for which the accused was prosecuted occurred in front of the jihadist prisonthis Moroccan was incarcerated in Estremera prison (Madrid) in application of the said judgment. As mentioned, he did not sit in the dock during the second trial, because he had already fled from Spain. We still don’t know where he is.
