Mustafa Maya Amaya – Rafael ‘El Gitano’ before converting to Islam and arrested last Monday – wanted to encourage members of his cell to attack “jointly or individually.” This has been specified by the General Information Commissariat of the National Police once Maya Amaya has returned to prison.
He had been free for a year after serving eight for recruiting men to send to fight in conflict zones. Along with him, the agents also detained another alleged jihadist in Fuenlabrada who had also been released recently.
Both, the Police continue, “have resumed their contacts with people related to the Jihad in order to carry out violent actions jointly or individually.”
The detainees would be persisting in their indoctrination work, especially of young people, using messaging applications to send this material, as well as to create and edit content. The judge sent them to prison this morning.
The operation, which has been developed jointly between the General Information Commissioner’s Office and the provincial Information brigades of Melilla and Madrid, has been coordinated by the Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court and directed by the Central Court of Instruction number 6. It has also counted on with the support of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and the EUROPOL Agency.
Maya Amaya was arrested in 2014 as part of an operation in which the National Police detained seven people who formed a network dedicated to recruiting young members over the Internet for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Jabhat Al. Nusra (JN) and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The network had branches in Morocco, Belgium, France, Tunisia, Turkey, Libya, Mali, Indonesia and Syria, among other countries, with the now once again detained man being the head of this network. For all of the above, he was sentenced in 2018 to eight years in prison and seven years of supervised release by the National Court.
The second arrested last Monday in Fuenlabrada (Madrid) is also a repeat offender. In 2014 he was arrested as part of an anti-terrorist operation that resulted in nine detainees related to the self-named ‘AlAndalus Brigade’, which financed, recruited, indoctrinated and sent fighters to join DAESH. Several of its members died fighting in Syria and Iraq against coalition forces in the ranks of the aforementioned terrorist organization.
During the eight years that he spent in prison for terrorism – since 1986 his entries and exits from prison for common crimes were common – Maya Amaya was placed in the Special Monitoring Inmate Files (FIES) regime due to his condition of “belonging to armed band”, as EL MUNDO has learned.
The Ministry of the Interior applied the FIES regime in 2014 in reaction to the dismantling of a cell that operated from the Topas prison in Salamanca. This radar tracks both jihadist inmates and those prisoners who have been admitted for common crimes who show suspicious behavior.
The man who is considered the largest recruiter in Europe approached jihadist postulates at the end of the 90s, when he was a repeat offender, and became radicalized outside, in Galicia.
The sentence that convicted him in 2018 placed him at the top “of one of the largest networks for recruiting and sending radicals to join terrorist organizations of a jihadist nature, inserted in the movement and ideology of global jihad.”
In the search of his house, the Police seized abundant material that showed his intentions, such as maps or precise instructions to take action in conflict zones. He also had a gun, projectiles and military clothing, as well as computers, telephones and storage cards with extensive documentation, plane tickets to Istanbul and compromised papers. All of this led the National Court to conclude that Maya Amaya built an architecture to direct “one of the largest networks for recruiting and sending radicals.”
“He developed a strategy that he called The Hegira before the Hegira by which he centralized the training and training activity of new candidates in the city of Melilla, where he resided,” the ruling indicated.
The magistrates concluded that the organization he led helped at least 30 people arrive from Mali, Syria or Libya to join Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Daesh or Jabaht Al Nusra.
