Yet another former Gitmo detainee returns to the battlefield.

Madrid (AFP) – Spanish police arrested eight people in pre-dawn raids in Madrid on Monday against a jihadist recruitment network led by a former Guantanamo Bay inmate, the government said.

Police have so far launched 12 raids in the Spanish capital, detaining eight people, and the investigation remains open, Spain’s interior ministry said in a statement.

The Islamic cell found and dispatched recruits for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants based in Syria and Iraq, the ministry said.

ISIL fighters made rapid military gains in Iraq last week, seizing the second-biggest city Mosul and coming within 80 kilometres (50 miles) of Baghdad’s city limits. Online photos, which cannot be independently confirmed, apparently show ISIL militants massacring captured Iraqi soldiers during the offensive.

“It should be highlighted that the leader of this cell lived in Spain after passing through the Guantanamo military base, having been arrested in Afghanistan in 2001,” the Spanish ministry said, without providing further details.