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Who Is The Hip Hop Jihadi Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, Linked With James Foley's Murder? Here's 9 Things We Know

Who Is The Hip Hop Jihadi Linked With Foley's Murder? 9 Things We Know
Jessica Elgot
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A rapper from west London is a key suspect linked with the murder of US journalist James Foley by Islamic State radicals in Iraq.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary left his home in Maida Vale to fight with IS in Syria, and has previously posted a picture of himself apparently holding aloft the severed head of an opponent.

Bary, whose music was played on BBC Radio 1, is said to have become radicalised after spending time with men linked to preacher Anjem Choudary.

Security services have reportedly identified the British jihadi who butchered Foley. Britain's ambassador to the US, Sir Peter Westmacott, told NBC News' Meet The Press: "We're not in a position to say exactly who this is but I think we are close." He added that "sophisticated" voice recognition equipment was being used to identify the killer.

Of all the known Brits who have travelled to fight in Syria, Bary's name has been most closely linked with the group, reportedly known as 'The Beatles' who killed Foley. Here's all we know about the boy who left his £1m London home to become a killer in the desert.

9 Things We Know About Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary
But he has tried to erase all traces of that life(01 of08)
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“A while back he tweeted, ‘please take down the [music] videos of me, I now reject all that’,” Raffaello Pantucci, a London researcher who has been following Jinny’s Twitter account for over a year, told the Evening Standard.
The family lived in a £1m home in Maida Vale(02 of08)
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The home on Randolph Avenue in Maida Vale was council-owned, and his mother raised him there with his siblings.
He posed with a severed head on Twitter, with the caption “Chillin’ with my other homie, or what’s left of him”(03 of08)
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Having left London to fight in Syria, he posted regular updates on social media, until he was banned from Twitter for posing with a severed head. Many have pointed out Bary is holding the head in his left hand, the same hand with which 'Jihadi John' holds the knife in the film of James Foley's beheading.
He was once abducted and robbed by opposition fighters(04 of08)
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IS forces have clashed with more moderate, anti-Assad fighters from the Free Syria Army in the past
He is the son of a Islamist militant who is currently awaiting trial(05 of08)
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Bary is the son of an Egyptian-born Al Qaeda-linked militant Adel Abdul Bary who is awaiting trail on terrorism charges in New York, due to his alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (credit:Matthew Fearn/PA Archive)
He has fought under the name Abu Kalashnikov and Soldier of Allah(06 of08)
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Bary's Twitter account has been suspended on numerous occasions, but he has posted pictures of himself with stockpiles of weapons.
The family was home-schooled because his mother was worried about bad influences(07 of08)
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In an interview in the Guardian with Victoria Brittain, Bary's mother Ragaa said she was left to raise her children alone in London as her husband fought extradition to the US. The family had been dependent on benefits for a number of years because of Bary's father's legal woes. "She began to hear about the London world outside her flat from the older ones, with stories about drugs, violence, knife crime and truancy among their schoolfriends. It terrified her," Brittain wrote. "She took most of them out of school and taught them their GCSEs at home." (credit:ASSOCIATED PRESS)
He was a supporter of Anonymous(08 of08)
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Along with two more rappers, he recorded an anthem in support of the hacktivists, with a video filmed outside St Paul’s Cathedral. (credit:ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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