Terror suspect likens 'Allah is great' to championing porn actor

Jacobo Orellana said he converted to Islam and changed his name to Yacoub. He was asked by his defence lawyer in the National Court of his cry of Allahu-akhbar in public was 'the same as a Catholic shouting, long live the Virgen del Rocío', or 'Virgin of the Dew', and replied: “Yes, it's like saying 'long live Nacho Vidal'.”

But Catholics may not see the likness, as Nacho Vidal is a famous porn actor.

'Yacoub' insists he was nothing to do with the Jihad cell broken up in Barcelona in 2015 – which was said to have been planning an attack – let alone being the leader of the ISIS faction in question, of which he is accused. “I couldn't even afford to register as self-employed, so how could I have been leader of an ISIS cell?” asked 'Yacoub', who was a fruit-seller before his arrest. He is facing up to 15 years in jail, along with nine others thought to have made up the cell Islamic Fraternity until they were broken up by a police raid in Terrasa in spring 2015.

“Christianity and Islam are not very different; they have much in common,” 'Yacoub' argued. “It was by searching for answers in Christianity that I found Islam.”

Making a point that he is an 'anti-independence catalán', 'Yacoub' says he does not know the other nine in the Jihad group beyond 'perhaps having met in the mosque in Terrasa', and 'had never spoken to anyone about staging an attack in Spain'. “If someone told me they were going to do that in my country, either I'd laugh or I'd go to the police,” he stressed. “My cousin, she nearly died in the attacks in Barcelona [in August 2017]. Would I have celebrated that just because I'm Muslim?”

Concerning the items found in his flat – religious texts and sulphur among others – Orellana says he was living there as a squatter but that others also used the property to 'store personal effects'. He denies owning a book with unattributed reflections such as 'Allah punishes infidels even if they do good', saying, “Islam has taught me values about respecting people, I'm not interested in punishing anyone.”

'Yacoub' said he 'could not deny' having talked about the war in Syria or ISIS when leaving the mosque with his friends, as he was overhead doing, but argues this does not make him a terrorist. Although he claims not to know the other nine Jihadis, two of them said they did know him, but they were 'not close friends' and only 'spoke now and again in passing' or when going out for elevenses after mosque. These two are also Spaniards who converted to Islam; Gonzalo Cabezas, now known as 'Sulaiman', and David Franco Portolés, who now calls himself Ibrahim say they switched to the faith 'because of their personal convictions', but that the 10 had never been all together until the court case, and 'Sulaiman' says he had 'never heard the name Islamic Fraternity until he was in custody'.

“We were more like a 'posse' of mates, but there are plenty of those in any religion,” Sulaiman said. “At no point did we talk of ISIS or of going to Syria to fight. If that had happened I'd have been scared stiff and I'd have left. It'd never occur to me to stage an attack in Catalunya; firstly as I'm not a Jihadi and, secondly, I'm very pro-Catalunya. We didn't watch videos of terrorism; I don't understand Arabic, so even if I had I wouldn't have known what it was about.”

Photos were found on Sulaiman's mobile of the ISIS flag, which he argues has been 'hijacked' by the terror group 'like the Swastika, a Hindu peace symbol hijacked by the Nazis'. Also, 'Ibrahim' and 'Sulaiman' said the books in their flats were gifts to 'celebrate' their conversion and they had not read them as they did not understand them. They likened it to newly-confirmed Christians being gifted a bible.