Malian war crime jihadi locked up in Scots prison

AN Islamist militant who was jailed as the world’s first cultural war criminal has been serving his sentence in a Scottish prison.

Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was imprisoned for nine years by the International Criminal Court (ICC) after pleading guilty to war crimes for his involvement in the destruction of ten mausoleums and religious sites in his native Mali in West Africa.

Jihadis used pickaxes and bulldozers to attack the mausoleums and the centuries-old door of the Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu in 2012. The sites were built in the 14th century as a trading hub and centre of Sufism, a branch of Islam seen as idolatrous by some groups.

Yesterday it was revealed al-Mahdi has been transferred from a jail in Niger to Shotts Prison, Lanarkshire, as part of Britain’s legal obligations to the ICC.

A prison source said: ‘Inmates come to Scotland to serve part or all of the sentence handed down by the ICC, but we do not get a say in which prisoners are sent to us.’

It is unclear how much of his term al-Mahdi will serve in Scotland.

An insider at Shotts prison said al-Mahdi had been complaining that the jail was too cold, but added: ‘He’s telling folk he can’t believe how comfortable prison life is for criminals in Scotland.’

Scottish Tory justice secretary Liam Kerr said: ‘The UK has to accept offenders convicted by the ICC, but one can only hope this man’s stay in Shotts is brief and the burden on the taxpayer is minimal.’