Thirteen men from Bulgaria’s Roma minority practicing an ultraconservative form of Islam went on trial Thursday charged with helping people join the ISIS group in Syria and propagating extremist ideology.
The accused form part of a Wahhabi community several hundred strong in several cities set up by self-proclaimed Roma imam Ahmed Moussa Ahmed, 40, who was already sentenced to two years in jail in 2015 for inciting hatred on religious grounds.
They were pictured with black ISIS flags and T-shirts, shouting Islamist slogans and making the raised-finger ISIS “salute”, state prosecutor Nedyalka Popova told the trial in the central city of Pazardzhik.
Their spiritual leaders also urged Muslims to be ready to wage war in videos released on the Internet, while some of the accused shared videos with ISIS executions on their profiles in the social media, Popova said.