Swedish jihadist Osama Krayem on Thursday appealed a life sentence handed down in July over the 2015 murder of a Jordanian pilot burned alive by the Islamic State group in Syria.
The Stockholm district court was the first to try a person over the infamous killing which sparked outrage around the world.
Krayem's lawyer appealed the ruling on Thursday to the Svea court of appeal, seeking a full acquittal on the grounds that the district court made "an erroneous judgement about Osama Krayem's intent."
Should it not grant a full acquittal, "Osama Krayem requests that the appeals court impose a more lenient sentence," defence lawyer Petra Eklund said, in the appeal filed with the court.
The district court had found 33-year-old Krayem guilty of "serious war crimes and terrorist crimes", ruling that he played an active role in the pilot's killing.
On December 24, 2014, an aircraft belonging to the Royal Jordanian Air Force crashed in Syria.
The pilot, Maaz al-Kassasbeh, was captured the same day by IS fighters near the central city of Raqqa and was burned alive in a cage sometime before February 3, 2015, when a slickly-produced video of the gruesome killing was published.
The Stockholm court found Krayem's role consisted of "guarding the victim both before and during the execution and taking him to the cage where he was set alight while still alive."
Krayem's lawyer insisted during the trial that he had spent only 15 to 20 minutes on-site, unaware of what was going to happen until he saw the cameras.
Krayem, who is from Malmo in southern Sweden, remained silent throughout the three-week trial in June, though segments from interrogations with him conducted during the investigation were read out and played during the trial.
He had already been sentenced to 30 years in prison in France for helping plan the November 2015 Paris attacks and to life imprisonment in Belgium for the 2016 attacks at Brussels' main airport and metro station.
France had agreed to hand him over to Sweden for nine months, the time needed for the investigation and trial.
