Aine Davis flew into the country after being released from Turkish prison
Aine Davis at an ISIS training camp. Picture: Facebook
A 38-year-old man from Hammersmith alleged to be one of the ‘ISIS Beatles’ has been arrested at Luton Airport.
Aine Davis, also known as Jihadi Paul, has been remanded in custody after being charged with terrorist offences. He is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on the morning of Thursday, 11 August.
He had previously been serving a jail term of seven and a half years in a Turkish prison.
Davis grew up in the Hammersmith area as well as spending part of his childhood in Gambia. His mother is a dinner lady who worked at Latymer Upper School and his father was an employee of John Lewis. His father had 13 children by four different women.
Aine Davis was a low-level drug dealer in the area with the nickname ‘Biggz’ but was sent to a young offenders’ institution after being caught in the back of a taxi with a firearm in 2004.
Whilst incarcerated he converted to Islam but on his release he found work as a tube driver. However, he later flew out to Syria in 2013 allegedly to support ISIS. Pictures of him were posted on social media at a jihadist training camp.
In 2014 his wife and mother of his two children, Amal el-Wahabi, who worked as a hairdresser, was jailed funding terrorism in Syria after it was found she was transferring money to him.
Davis denies being a member of the ISIS Beatles, a group of English fighters, who tortured and beheaded hostages. According to authorities in the US, they were responsible for beheading over 27 people including British aid worker David Haines and James Foley, an American journalist.
One member of the group was Alexanda Kotey from Shepherd’s Bush who is currently in an American prison. Kotey is suspected of helping to organise the terror plot in 2014 which aimed to murder soldiers and police officers. The alleged plan was to attack the former Shepherd’s Bush police station in Uxbridge Road and the army barracks in South Africa Road and then make a getaway on mopeds. Kotey was reportedly in regular communication with medical student Tarik Hassane, who was jailed for life in 2016 for conspiring to commit a terrorist murder and ordered to serve a minimum of 21 years for his part as ringleader of the gang.
Alexanda Kotey (left) and El Shafee Elsheikh (right)
Another alleged member of the ISIS Beatles, El Shafee Elsheikh was captured by the Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. He was responsible for guarding prisoners and subjected them to waterboarding and mock executions. Born in the Sudan he grew up in White City and supports QPR as does Kotey. At one point he preached from a stall outside Shepherd's Bush Tube Station. He studied engineering at Acton College then worked as a mechanic and on the funfair when it visited Shepherd's Bush Green. His youngest brother Mahmoud also joined IS as and was killed in Tikrit, Iraq, in April 2015.
He was sent to the US in 2020 along with Kotey, This April he was convicted of lethal hostage taking and conspiracy to commit murder and awaits sentencing. As part of the terms of his extradition, he will not be given the death penalty.
Mohammed Emwazi, widely known as Jihadi John, died in a drone strike in 2015.
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August 11, 2022
