A convicted terrorist is now free and living in the United Kingdom after a judge agreed he was too obese to survive the Chinese coronavirus in jail.
“Adel Abdel Bary, 60, had spent 21 years in a New Jersey prison for his role in the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of two US embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans,” the New York Post reported Friday.
In granting his release, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote, “Defendant’s obesity and somewhat advanced age make COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] significantly more risky to him than to the average person.”
Prosecutors did not agree that his age made him more at risk for the coronavirus, but conceded that his body mass index of 36 did make him more vulnerable.
“The defendant’s obesity is an extraordinary and compelling reason that could justify a reduction of his sentence in light of the current pandemic,” they said.
The Egyptian national received asylum in Britain in the 1990s due in part to help from Amnesty International, according to Breitbart News:
Bary is a wanted man in Egypt, where he has been sentenced to death in absentia for his part in a plot to blow up a public market, but it is all but guaranteed that the British government will not extradite him to his native country, due to domestic and European laws which insist the British must take it upon themselves to shelter foreign terrorists who face the death penalty in [their] homelands.
During a court appearance in 2014, Bary “wept as he pleaded guilty to making a threat to use an explosive device and conspiracy to murder American people,” Breitbart News reported.
“Mr[.] Bary’s son, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, is a British rapper who fled to Syria to fight with ISIS. He is one of the people suspected to be ‘Jihadi John’, the masked man who brutally murdered three hostages in videos posted online,” the article read.
Following his release, Bary reunited with his wife who resides in a $1 million-plus London apartment.
“Just serving a sentence doesn’t mean that a person has been rehabilitated, doesn’t mean that their core thinking has changed,” said Edith Bartley, whose brother was one of the victims.
“This is a person who can still do harm in the world,” she concluded.
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