Finland charged two 23-year-old Iraqi refugees Friday morning with a terror-related murder of 11 people, after they were allegedly spotted in an Islamic State (ISIS) execution video from 2014.
The execution video shows victims lying on the ground getting shot one by one by unmasked shooters. The men were detained Thursday and were charged Friday morning based on a probable cause. They both plead not guilty.
The executions were part of the June 2014 ISIS Camp Speicher massacre of unarmed Iraqi air force cadets near Tikrit, which is believed to have taken more than 1,000 lives.
They arrived in Finland as refugees in September. Detective Jari Räty declined to comment on whether or not they had filed asylum applications.
The arrests caused a bit of panic around Finland Thursday. Finland has taken 32,000 refugees so far in 2015.
“Of course we need to react in a condemning matter and distance ourselves from these actions, but we shouldn’t overreact,” Mats Fridlund, researcher on the history of science and technology of terrorism at the University of Aalto, told public broadcaster YLE. “We need to keep in mind that the terrorists want us to overreact. That’s the way terrorist measure their influence. If we change our behavior we give them power.”
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