Steve Duarte, who travelled from the small town of Meispelt in Luxembourg to Syria in 2014 to join the Islamic State (IS), was sentenced to life imprisonment by a capital city criminal court on Monday.
Duarte’s precise whereabouts are unknown, though there are indications he is probably still in a prison in northern Syria. The trial against him was conducted in absentia.
A Portuguese national raised in Luxembourg, Duarte had converted to Islam in 2010. In a 2019 interview with Kurdish news media Rûdaw, Duarte said he initially travelled to the Arabian Peninsula to study Islam and detailed how a Facebook contact recruited him to IS in Syria.
In the interview, he claimed he did not take part in fighting but that he had produced footage for the militant organisation. However, Portuguese security services in 2016 identified Duarte as one of five hooded jihadists who appear in a video in which orange-clad prisoners of the IS are executed.
Duarte has 40 days to appeal against the judgement.
(This article was first published by Luxemburger Wort. Translated using AI; edited and with additional reporting by Duncan Roberts)