Wellington: A militant from New Zealand who has links with Al Qaida and has taken up arms in Syria, mistakenly broadcasted his exact location after forgetting to turn off a tracking function on his phone, media reported late on Tuesday.
Mohammad Daniel, alias Abu Abdul Rahman, formerly known as Mark John Taylor, deleted 45 posts from his Twitter account after realising that he had been revealing his location to intelligence agencies and others keeping tabs on him, the New Zealand Herald reported.
Experts say such information is invaluable in helping investigators establish links that foreign fighters have with terrorist groups.
Daniel’s mistake was spotted by Canada-based open source intelligence research group iBRABO.
Daniel’s tweets apparently show that in October this year he was with the Daesh militant group in Kafar Roma, an area that President Bashar Al Assad’s Syrian army has previously confirmed had been occupied by pockets of foreign fighters from Daesh.
His tweets stopped around the time that the Syrian army made a strong push into the area.
He then went off the grid for several months while fighting in the desert and finally retreated to the Daesh stronghold of Al Tabqah in early December.
Daniel sent several tweets from Al Tabqah which allowed iBRABO to pinpoint a specific house in the southwest of Al Tabqah that he had “predominantly used” from December 3 to 10.
A recent photo update that shows the face of another Daesh fighter showed Daniel again on the move.
In September, Daniel claimed to have been in touch with the New Zealand government in a bid to get a new passport after burning his last one.
Daniel left New Zealand in May 2012 and worked in Indonesia for two years as an English teacher.
