Al Qaeda's top terrorist is a techie

LONDON: A 23 year-old IT student and son of a foreign diplomat has been identified as Al Qaeda's top cyber terrorist and has been jailed for 16 years by a court here, becoming the first person to be prosecuted in Britain for inciting murder purely based on the Internet.

Younes Tsouli, a computer nerd from Shepherd's Bush in west London, used his top-floor flat to help Islamist extremists wage a propaganda war against the West, The Daily Mail reported today.

Under the name Irhabi 007 -- combining the James Bond reference with the Arabic for terrorist -- he worked with Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq and came up with a way to convert often gruesome videos into a form that could be put onto the Web.

Videos he posted included messages from Osama bin Laden and images of the kidnapping and murder of hostages in Iraq such as American Nick Berg.

Tsouli arrived in London in 2001 with his father, a Moroccan diplomat. He studied IT at a college in central London and was quickly radicalised by images of the war in Iraq posted on the Internet.

By 2003 he had already begun posting his own material including a manual on computer hacking and a year later had moved on to publishing extremist images and Al Qaeda propaganda on the web.

It is claimed Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq spotted Tsouli's work and took the decision to recruit him, using his expertise to post their own extremist videos to a wider audience.