Cyber-terrorists who incited murder are jailed
By John Steele
The Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:13pm BST 06/07/2007
Three men who used the internet to incite Muslims to wage murderous holy war against non-believers were jailed yesterday.
They included Younes Tsouli, 23, who hosted a jihadi chat site, which attracted a message from a purported group of 45 doctors who wanted to use car bombs and grenade rockets to launch attacks in the US. Tsouli, who also ran a site which regularly featured beheadings, was imprisoned for 10 years.
Tariq Al-Daour, who was also involved in a 1.8 million fraud, was jailed for six and a half years. The third man, Waseem Mughal, was given a seven-and-a-half-year sentence at Woolwich Crown court, south-east London.
All three pleaded guilty two months into their trial to “inciting another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom which would, if committed in England and Wales, constitute murder”.
They are the first people to be convicted, effectively, of incitement to murder over the internet. The case is also the first prosecution to be based entirely on the distribution of jihadi material on the internet. Mr Justice Openshaw described the men as engaging in “cyber jihad”, adding: “Much of the material was directed at young men who are more likely to be impressionable and are, of course, of military age.
“Much of it does amount to incitement to commit murder by way of encouragement to join the call of arms, to participate in jihad, to go on and commit an act of terrorism.”
He said Tsouli should be deported to Morocco after serving his sentence. Tsouli, of Shepherd's Bush, west London, ran the websites for four months in the summer and autumn of 2005.
British-born Mughal, 24, of Chatham, Kent, and Al-Daour, 21, of Bayswater, west London, who was born in the United Arab Emirates, provided Tsouli with the means to make payments to create the sites.
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