Arrest Warrant Issued for Bakri on Multiple Terror Charges
First Military Examining Magistrate Riyad Abu Ghida on Monday issued an arrest warrant for detained radical cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri on multiple terror charges, state-run National News Agency reported.
Abu Ghida interrogated Bakri regarding charges of “belonging to armed terrorist groups; training militants on arms and explosives; seeking to create an Islamic emirate in the North; and delivering religious sermons containing insults against the state and the army and incitement to civil war,” NNA said.
On Tuesday, the military prosecutor had charged Bakri, who was arrested last month, with belonging to terrorist organizations and plotting to establish an Islamic state.
The extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida breakaway group, is among the groups Bakri is accused of belonging to, according to NNA.
The Lebanese authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Bakri for involvement in the clashes in the northern city of Tripoli but he fled to an unknown destination in April.
He was apprehended by the Internal Security Forces Intelligence Bureau at his residence in the Mount Lebanon town of Aley on May 25.
Bakri lived in Britain for almost 20 years before settling in Lebanon in 2005 after he was banned from London under government curbs following the underground and bus bombings that year.
The Syrian-born cleric, who also holds Lebanese nationality, has denied he has any links to al-Qaida although he said he believed in "the same ideology."
Y.R.
M.T.
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