Libya's most wanted terrorist arrested

Jihadist terrorism in Libya receives a new blow. General Ahmed al-Mismari, spokesman of the Libyan National Army (LNA), has announced that Mohammad Mohammad al-Sayyid, who was considered the most dangerous terrorist in the country, has been arrested.

He is also known by the nicknames of Mohammed al-Sanbakhti or Abu Khaled Munir. Al-Mismari has reported that his arrest has taken place in Ghout al-Shmal, outside Tripoli. For a time, he was Hisham al-Ashmawy's second in command of the terrorist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, the former Daesh branch in the Sinai peninsula. When the latter was arrested - and later executed along with 36 of his co-religionists - Al-Sayyid assumed the reins of the organisation.

The terrorist arrested in Libya comes from an Egyptian family with a long history of criminal activity. The newspaper Egypt Today reported that Al-Sayyid has two brothers in prison.

He has been implicated in several attacks on Coptic churches in his home country. It remains to be seen whether he will be tried in Libya or Egypt. However, Cairo is an important ally of the LNA in Khalifa Haftar, which is responsible for his capture, so it is possible that the administration in Tobruk will agree to extradite him.

In fact, Al-Masdar News has already noted that the detainee is already being transferred to Benghazi, in the east of the country and closer to the Egyptian border.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, literally the 'Followers of the House of Jerusalem', made an appearance as a terrorist group in 2011, with the aim of establishing a caliphate on Egyptian territory. Based in Sinai province, their leaders swore allegiance to Daesh in 2014. Among its most recurrent targets are precisely the Coptic churches and the Egyptian security forces.

For months now, Tripoli - and, by extension, the areas of Libya controlled by Fayez Sarraj's Government of National Accord (GNA) - has become a place where many jihadi terrorists have sought refuge.

In the context of the civil war in which the country finds itself, the alliance between the GNA, Turkey and Qatar has integrated into its ranks a very significant number of combatants associated with these types of organisations. According to figures from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), more than 5,000 mercenaries fighting under the command of Tripoli and Ankara have arrived from Syria alone.