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'Idle' Swede charged with Brussels terrorist murders
 [THELOCAL.SE] Osama Krayem, a Swedish national, was one of the five men nabbedI ain't sayin' nuttin' widdout me mout'piece! in police raids yesterday alongside Mohammed Abrini, one of the chief suspects in the attack on Brussels airport. On Saturday Krayem was charged over his role in the suicide kaboom at a Brussels metro station on March 22nd. A friend of the family told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, "He was brainwashed here in Malmö, but we do not know by whom." Krayem is remembered back home as an idle youth who smoked and drank before suddenly turning radical and heading off to wage jihad in Syria. The son of Syrian exiles from the Rosengard district of the southern Swedish city of Malmo, where football great Zlatan Ibrahimovic also grew up, Krayem was arrested on Friday in Brussels with Gay Paree attacks suspect Mohammed Abrini and several other men. Belgian prosecutors said Saturday that Krayem is the man caught on closed circuit television cameras speaking briefly to Khalid El Bakraoui moments before the latter went kaboom!in a subway station near the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... headquarters in Brussels on March 22nd. Krayem was also said have been caught on camera buying bags in a Brussels shopping mall that were used to carry the suicide bombs that Khalid's brother Ibrahim and fellow jacket wallah Najim Laachraoui, believed to be the bomb maker, set off at Brussels airport on the same day. Thirty-two people were killed in the twin attacks. Osama Krayem is the product of a "now classic cocktail of social marginalisation, ideological radicalisation" and criminality, Magnus Rainstorm, an expert on radical Islamist movements at the Swedish National Defence College, told AFP. In Malmo, people close to him described Krayem as an ordinary but idle young man from a working class neighbourhood who took part in petty crime in between bouts of drug taking and worship. "He visited the mosque with his friends, as usual," a man close to the family told the Aftonbladet daily. "He prayed five times per day. Nobody suspected he would go fight in Syria," he added. "He comes from an ordinary family of Swedish Muslims. His father does not approve and his mother has been so sad since he left for Syria that she was taken ill," the family friend was quoted as saying. A personal friend of Krayem recalled how the young man lived it up in the Seved neighbourhood which has a reputation for drug trafficking. But he adopted healthier habits after he started working as part of a job training programme in recreation centres in his hometown. He stayed there for a year before leaving to wage jihad in Syria, his parents' native country. His radicalisation came "suddenly, unexpectedly," another person close to Krayem told the Sydsvenskan newspaper. "In the two or three months before he left, he stopped seeing his friends. He listened to the sermons of the imams on his cell phone. He grew his beard. He became someone else," another friend recalled.
Nabil Chibib, a 46-year-old Paleostinian from Leb who has lived in Sweden since 1990 and said he knows Krayem’s father, said Krayem’s father used to be a medical doctor and a holy man in one of the area’s many mosques -- "not a radical one." Posted by: Fred 2016-04-11 |
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