Osama Krayem, the 23-year-old Syrian-born Swedish citizen arrested in Belgium last week for his involvement in the March 22 bomb attacks in Brussels, is a former poster boy for Sweden’s efforts at integrating immigrants into their society.
Now accused of murder -- and captured on closed-circuit television cameras carrying bags that contained explosive devices like those used to kill 32 civilians -- Krayem had been hailed as a successful model of integration when he was 11 years old.
According to an article by Oliver Lane on the Breitbart website, the alleged terrorist was the focus of a 2005 documentary entitled Without Borders -- A Film About Sport and Integration, in which the “football-mad” Krayem demonstrated how being on a city's sports team had helped him blend into the Swedish population.
“Both of Osama’s parents are Syrian migrants to Sweden,” Lane stated, and they encouraged their son to take part in the club's integration project.
Club marketing manager Christer Girke said of the program: “We wanted to show the importance of integration. … The boys were to go to the association to see what the other Swedes did and get to know the [football] associations were important, how it can be a gateway to jobs and much more.”
At the time of the film’s release, Girke told local media that “90 percent of our members have a migrant background, as this integration is something I think a lot about.”
“With this project, we want to take responsibility for the society we will all be living in,” he noted, “and how we are formed as people.”
“Osama was sullen and stayed in the background,” Girke noted in another interview, “but he was a good player and always one of the gang. There was never any problem with him.”
“A school friend told the paper that he was 'noticeable' by the fact he didn’t party or drink because of his religion,” Lane stated.
“Even when Krayem started posting pictures of himself on Facebook with Islamic State flags and guns, his old friends didn’t think anything was wrong,” the reporter noted. “One said he just thought Krayem was trying to be 'cool' and that was just what 'young people are doing.'”
“Shot with a budget of £22,000, an opening-night review” of the movie; … hailed the “football-mad sons” of the Krayem family -- the central players in the film -- as showing “the essential role of sport for integration.”
Lane continued:
When Krayem got a job with the Malmo city council as a management intern, he may have been displaying the outward signs of assimilation that were expected of him.
But what his employers did not know is that he was saving his salary to buy tickets to Syria. He worked for a year before suddenly failing to turn up for work one day in 2014.
A family friend noted that shortly before he vanished, Krayem began dressing differently: “More traditionally, I would say. He had started to grow a beard. He said everything was fine when I talked to him.”
By January of 2015, he began turning up later in photos of jihadists in Syria posted on Facebook. He then traveled back to Europe, passing through Greece posing as a migrant.
Krayem had “joined the Islamic State and started posting pictures of his exploits on Facebook,” the Breitbart reporter stated.
“A year later, he had swapped the migrant enclave he had grown up in -- Rosengard -- for another,” Lane noted. “Traveling through Greece as a refugee, he came to reside in Molenbeck, Brussels,” where “he took on a leading role in organizing the bomb attacks.”
“That superficially well-integrated migrants could be plotting attacks or engaging in criminal activity is not a phenomenon limited to Sweden,” he noted. “Breitbart London reported in January on four 'unaccompanied minor' migrants who sexually abused young girls at their new school shortly after arrival.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, Washington Post writer Philip Bump used the tragedy to attack GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, whom he said is "most likely safely cocooned in his luxurious home at the top of the Manhattan skyscrpater he built" while commenting on the overseas tragedy by telephone.
Also on March 22, New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin tried to downplay "the insular, hostile, terrorist-breeding ground nature of Brussels’ Molenbeek neighborhood" and stated the newspaper had devoted a full report in January "defending Brussels from Trump after he called the city a 'hell-hole' during a discussion of the Islamic massacres in Paris."
Krayem is currently awaiting trial in Belgium for his part in the Brussels bombings. He was supposed to be the second suicide bomber at the Maalbeek subway station, but he got “cold feet” and will probably have plenty of time to keep them warm in a prison cell for many years to come.
