Hesham Ashmawy

Hesham Ashmawy
Ashmawy appearing in a propaganda video by al-Mourabitoun,[1] a Libya-based militant group which he led from Derna. His nom de guerre, "Abu Omar al-Muhajir", appears below.
Native name	هشام علي عشماوي مسعد إبراهيم
Birth name	Hesham Ali Ashmawy Mos'ad Ibrahim
Born	1978
Died	4 March 2020(2020-03-04) (aged 41–42)
Allegiance	Egypt (1996–2011) Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (2013–2014) Al-Mourabitoun (2015–2018)

Hesham Ali Ashmawy Mos'ad Ibrahim (Arabic: هشام علي عشماوي مسعد إبراهيم;‎ 1978 – 4 March 2020) was a convicted terrorist who previously was an Egyptian Army officer, suspected by the government of having orchestrated and been involved in a number of terrorist attacks on security targets and state institutions, including the 2014 Farafra ambush and the 2015 assassination of Prosecutor general Hisham Barakat.^[2]

Ashmawy joined the military in 1996 and eventually became an officer in the Thunderbolt unit. He showed increasing signs of radicalization over the years, which was further aggravated by his father's death in 2010. Accusations of spreading extremist thought and of incitement against the Egyptian Armed Forces led to his eventual dismissal from the military in 2011 under circumstances that remain unclear. He embraced al-Qaeda and went on to join Ansar Bait al-Maqdis in 2012, but eventually defected from the group in 2015, following its declaration of allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. He formed instead his own network, al-Mourabitoun, which based itself in Libya and remained loyal to al-Qaeda.

He became one of Egypt's most wanted militants, before being arrested on 8 October 2018, during a counter-insurgency operation by the Libyan National Army in Derna. On 28 May 2019, Ashmawy was handed over to the Egyptian authorities.^[3] He was executed on 4 March 2020.^[4]