Bosnia Extradites Kosovo Jihadist to U.S.
Bosnia has extradited to the United States a Kosovo jihadist whom Washington suspects of links to jihadist groups, four months after his arrest in Sarajevo, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Bosnia's prosecutors "took part in a complex operation to locate and extradite to the U.S. a person originating from Kosovo with terrorism links," a statement said.
No more details were available due to "sensitivity of the case," it added.
But the Zurnal.info website, specialized in terrorism issues, identified the man as Mirsad Kandic, a "dangerous collaborator of the Islamic State" jihadist group.
U.S. authorities accuse Kandic of having spent time in the former IS bastion of Raqa in Syria, and of providing logistical support to the jihadists, the site reported.
He had provided IS with weapons and suicide vests, used notably by Jake Bilardi, an 18-year-old Australian killed in a 2015 suicide attack against the Iraqi army in the west of the country, according to Zurnal.info.
Kandic entered Bosnia early this year through Sarajevo airport, using a fake Ukrainian passport.
He was arrested in July during a raid on a Sarajevo apartment.
Analysts have warned that thousands of foreign jihadists fleeing IS-held territories in Iraq and Syria could pose major security problems as they return home.
IS proclaimed a caliphate in 2014 on territories the size of Italy which it had seized in a sweeping assault across swathes of Iraq and Syria.
It has since lost some 85 percent of the territories it controlled to U.S. and Russian-backed offensives.
Around 240 Bosnian citizens had joined the jihadists on the frontlines of Iraq and Syria since 2012, the Bosnian authorities said in August.
A total of 116, nearly half of them men, were still believed to be there, while at least 65 were killed.
Half of the 46 who returned to Bosnia were condemned to prison terms.
Some 300 Kosovo Albanians had also joined the jihadists' ranks in Iraq and Syria in recent years, among whom some 60 were killed, according to the Kosovo authorities.
Source: Agence France Presse
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