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STOCKHOLM: A Swedish man was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on Thursday for his role in the 2015 killing of a Jordanian pilot by the Daesh militant group, Swedish media reported.
The 26-year-old Jordanian, 1st Lt. Mu’ath Al-Kaseasbeh, was taken captive after his F-16 fighter jet crashed near the extremists’ de facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria. He was forced into a cage that was set on fire in early 2015.
The suspect, identified by Swedish prosecutors as Osama Krayem, 32, is alleged to have traveled to Syria in September 2014 to fight for Daesh.
Swedish prosecutors say Krayem, armed and masked, was among those who forced Al-Kaseasbeh into the cage. The pilot died in the fire.
Krayem was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday, Swedish news agency TT reported. He was indicted by Swedish prosecutors in May on suspicion of committing serious war crimes and terrorist crimes in Syria.
He was previously convicted in France and Brussels for fatal Daesh attacks in those countries.
The airman became the first known foreign military pilot to fall into the militants’ hands after the US-led international coalition began its aerial campaign against the Daesh group in Syria and Iraq in 2014.
Jordan, a close US ally, was a member of the coalition and the pilot’s killing appeared aimed at pressuring the government of Jordan to leave the alliance.
In a 20-minute video released in 2015, purportedly showing Al-Kaseasbeh’s killing, he displayed signs of having been beaten, including a black eye. He is shown wearing an orange jumpsuit and standing in an outdoor cage as a masked militant ignites a line of fuel leading to it.
The footage, widely released as part of the militant group’s propaganda, sparked outrage and anti-IS demonstrations in Jordan.
In 2022, Krayem was among 20 men convicted by a special terrorism court in Paris for involvement in a wave of Deash attacks in the French capital in 2015, targeting the Bataclan theater, Paris cafés and the national stadium. The assaults killed 130 people and injured hundreds, some permanently maimed.
Krayem was sentenced to 30 years in prison, for charges including complicity to terrorist murder. French media reported that France agreed in March to turn Krayem over to Sweden for the investigation and trial.
In 2023, a Belgian court sentenced Krayem, among others, to life in prison on charges of terrorist murder in connection with 2016 suicide bombings that killed 32 people and wounded hundreds at Brussels airport and a busy subway station in the country’s deadliest peacetime attack.
Krayem was aboard the commuter train that was hit, but did not detonate the explosives he was carrying.
Both the Paris and Brussels attacks were linked to the same Daesh network.

HELSINKI: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday that the world should push for “regime change” in Russia, arguing that President Vladimir Putin otherwise would continue to destabilize its neighbors.
“I believe Russia can be pushed to stop this war. It started it, and it can be made to end it, but if the world doesn’t aim to change the regime in Russia, that means even after the war ends, Moscow will still try to destabilize neighboring countries,” Zelensky told a conference marking 50 years since the signing of the “Helsinki Final Act” on respecting borders and territorial integrity.
Zelensky also called for the confiscation of Russia’s financial assets, following the latest deadly strike by Moscow on Kyiv.
“We need to fully block Russia’s war machine ... put every frozen Russian asset, including the stolen wealth of corruption to work defending against Russian aggression. It’s time to confiscate Russian assets, not just freeze them, confiscate them and use them to serve peace, not war,” Zelensky told the Helsinki conference in an online address.