A convicted rapist has once again been jailed in Britain after he was found guilty of sending COVID pandemic payments to the Islamic State.
Tarek Namouz, 43, has once again been put behind bars after authorities found that he had sent over £11,000 (~$13,000) to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Some of the money sent by the Muslim extremist is believed to have originated from COVID relief funds provided to him by the British government over the period of lockdown, with the cash injections being aimed at keeping the rapist’s barber shop in west London open.
However, according to a report by The Telegraph, the funding instead appears to have gone to ISIS, with Namouz allegedly bragging to a fellow inmate in prison that he had sent at least £25,000 (~$30,000) to the Islamic State for the purpose of funding jihad.
Namouz — who had previously been jailed for raping a woman at a pub where he was the landlord — has now been convicted of eight counts of entering into a funding arrangement for terrorism between November 2020 and May 2021, as well as a further two counts of possessing terrorist information, which was in relation to extremist ISIS videos found on his phone.
The man was subsequently handed a 12-years isentence during a hearing on Thursday, with the rapist reportedly screaming at police as he was led away.
“May Allah destroy you,” The Telegraph describes him as shouting.
“We will meet on judgment day. You’re a kafir [non-believer] and you will end up in Hell.”
The story of an ISIS sympathiser sending COVID funds abroad to support the efforts of terrorism has garnered the attention of media in the United Kingdom, with various outlets running stories covering how the British government became an unwitting party in the funding of Islamic extremism.
However, while the incident has no doubt resulted in a bad PR day for the Treasury, as well as the country’s security services, history has indicated that the European continent as a whole has long had problems with state welfare being funnelled into extremist programmes.
According to a report by USA Today, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, France, and Britain, among others, have all seen welfare funding end up in the hands of ISIS.
Denmark saw a total of $100,000 being handed to men who ended up fleeing to fight in Syria, for example.
“It is a huge scandal that we disburse money from the welfare fund in Denmark for people who go to Syria,” the country’s then-Labour Minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, remarked at the time.
“Staying in a war zone and directly or indirectly taking part in military operations is not something that is in any way compatible with receiving disability benefits.”
Despite such a strong statement, things do not appear to have gotten much better overall since then, with one expert warning late last year that the European Union, in particular, has lost its focus when it comes to tackling the financing of terrorism.
Tom Keatinge, a founding director of the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), warned in POLITICO that efforts to cut off terror financing within the bloc had dropped off substantially.
Keatinge warned that many groups within the Union are now more concerned with meeting the technical requirements set out by EU laws as opposed to actually working to eradicate the misuse of funds, leaving the EU open to seeing funds potentially mismanaged.
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