Sweden jihadist jailed for life over Jordanian pilot burned alive

By AFP 31 July 2025, 4:01 pm

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This court sketch made on November 4, 2021, shows Osama Krayem on trial for the November 13, 2015, Paris attacks, during the trial taking place in a temporary courtroom set up at the Palais de Justice of Paris. (Benoit PEYRUCQ / AFP)

A Stockholm court hands down a life term to Swedish jihadist Osama Krayem over the 2015 murder of a Jordanian pilot burned alive by the Islamic State group in Syria.

The Swedish court is the first to try a person over the infamous killing that sparked outrage around the world.

Judge Anna Liljenberg Gullesjo says “the investigation has shown that the defendant was at the execution site, uniformed and armed, and allowed himself to be filmed.”

Although video evidence showed that another man lit the fire, the judge says the “defendant’s actions contributed so significantly to the death of the victim that he should be considered a perpetrator.”

Krayem, who is serving long prison sentences for his role in the Paris and Brussels attacks in 2015 and 2016, was given a life sentence for “serious war crimes and terrorist crimes.”

On December 24, 2014, an aircraft belonging to the Royal Jordanian Air Force crashed in Syria. The pilot, Maaz al-Kassasbeh, was captured the same day by ISIS fighters near the central city of Raqqa and was burned alive in a cage sometime before February 3, 2015, when a slickly produced video of the gruesome killing was published.

Gullesjo says Krayem’s actions consisted of “guarding the victim both before and during the execution and taking him to the cage where he was set alight while still alive.”