Brahim Garouan

Brahim Garouan is a Moroccan citizen, born in 1986. He was living in Italy with his father M’hamed, the Imam of the town of Sellia marina (in the province of Catanzaro), and his friend Younes Dahhaki, when he was arrested on January 31, 2011, at the age of 25, by order of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Catanzaro.
The three were accused of training for terrorism. Brahim would both retrieve jihadist material online, such as manuals for bomb-making, gun handling and cyberweapons, and post online the radical sermons of his father, who in turn would propagate the material provided by his son in his mosque. The material also included videos of terrorist attacks and executions carried out by the Islamic State. The father himself had been linked by authorities to the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, a group with ties to al-Qaeda.
In July 2011, the Supreme Court requested the annulment of their preventive detention order on the grounds that they were not planning to carry out an attack and therefore the crime of “training” (both as a passive and active act) could not be applied. Therefore, the criminal case against them was dismissed.
After being released, Brahim and his father left Italy to go back to Morocco. Brahim later joined jihadist fighters in Syria, to fight against Assad’s army. Finally, he was killed there in April of 2014.
Later that same year an Italian tribunal ruled that the three individuals were owed roughly 60 000 euros each for “wrongful detention” for the 8 months spent in prison in 2011. As Brahim was dead, it is likely the sum went to his family.