Female ‘Twitter terrorist’ jailed for 3,5 years in UK

PanARMENIAN.Net - A young woman who admitted being a “Twitter terrorist” on a massive scale has been jailed for three and a half years in UK, the Guardian reports.

Alaa Esayed, 22, posted more than 45,000 tweets in Arabic on an open account to her 8,240 followers between June 2013 and May 2014, with many encouraging violent jihad.

Her account, which bore a profile of a woman in a burka with one finger raised and holding a kalashnikov, even came to the attention of al-Qaida, which listed it as among the 66 most important jihadi accounts.

Esayed, from Kennington, south London, was sentenced at the Old Bailey on Thursday, June 11, after pleading guilty to encouraging terrorism and disseminating a terrorist publication.

The judge Charles Wide told her: “This material and its dissemination is an important factor in the encouragement of young men and women to travel abroad and engage in acts of terrorism… The material you were disseminating encouraged young men to go and fight and you now accept that was your intention and, furthermore, to encourage women to go to support them and indeed to bring up their children in the belief that it is their duty to take up arms to wage violent jihad and embrace martyrdom. And furthermore to encourage mothers to be proud of their sons who die as martyrs.”

Esayed was brought up in Mosul, Iraq, and came to Britain with her family in 2007 after her father, who worked for the military, was forced to flee the country.

Most of Esayed’s posts were cut and pasted from other sources and she insisted she did not support violent jihad. She had no intention of being a martyr and she could not even read or write Arabic well, a statement to police after her arrest said.

Her lawyer, Tanveer Qureshi, said in mitigation: “Yes, she is a Twitter terrorist, but she is a Twitter terrorist who lacked creativity. She did not have a blog. She was blindly cutting and pasting.”