ISTNABUL, Turkey—A court in Turkey has charged Aine Davis, 33, of west London with being member of a terrorist organization and sentenced to a seven-and-a-half-year prison term, according to a BBC report.
Davis is said to have been a member of the notorious gang of four British jihadists that other members called “The Beatles”, including ISIS executioner “Jihadi John” or Mohammed Emwazi.
Emwazi is said to have been killed in a drone strike last year.
The quartet are suspected to be the ISIS men who brutalized Western hostages in Syria, subjecting them to harsh treatment such as routine beatings and waterboarding as well as mock executions. They are also suspected of having beheaded American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley.
Davis is said to have been smuggled out of Syria to Turkey by ISIS. He was later arrested in 2015 in a raid on a villa in Silivri, west of Istanbul. Turkish officials stated that at the time of his arrest, he was in the process of plotting an attack on Istanbul to coincide with the attacks on Paris in 2015 which left 130 people dead.
At the trial held on Tuesday, a Jordanian national and Saudi national were also convicted on ties to ISIS and were given the same prison sentence as Davis.
Davis denied involvement with the militant group. "I am not IS. I went to Syria because there was oppression in my country," he said. Speaking in English, he told the court, "I want to make clear I am innocent of the charges. I don't even know why this case has taken so long to judge. I just want my freedom." Davis claimed he went to Syria on two occasions to participate in humanitarian work as reported by BBC.
The case took Turkish prosecutors 18 months to complete as authorities struggled with evidence in an attempt to prove a weightier charge that would have imposed a longer prison sentence on Davis.
Both British and US authorities had lobbied for Davis’ extradition to their own countries, hoping to put him on trial there.
So far, Davis holds the highest profile of British nationals to be arrested on ISIS related terror charges.
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