By Nate Raymond

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An Arizona man is set to face trial on charges that he provided support to Islamic State by helping a New York City college student travel to Syria, where he died fighting for the militant group.

Opening statements were expected on Tuesday in Manhattan federal court in the case of Ahmed Mohammed El Gammal, 44, who was arrested in 2015 and charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

El Gammal, who has pleaded not guilty, is one of more than 100 people to face U.S. charges since 2014 in cases related to the Islamic State militant group, which controls parts of Iraq and Syria.

Prosecutors said the case stemmed from El Gammal’s interactions with Samy Mohammed El-Goarany, a U.S. citizen.

By 2014, El-Goarany, then 24, had begun expressing increased interest in militant forms of Islam, prosecutors said. They said he first contacted El Gammal in August of that year after learning of online comments he posted supporting Islamic State.

El Gammal later traveled to New York and met El-Goarany, who according to a LinkedIn profile attended Baruch College in Manhattan from 2009 to 2013. He then arranged for El-Goarany to get in touch with an individual living in Turkey to help El-Goarany travel to join Islamic State, prosecutors said.

El-Goarany subsequently traveled from New York City to Istanbul in January 2015, and sometime in mid-February arrived in Syria, prosecutors said.

After learning of El Gammal’s arrest in 2015, El-Goarany posted a video on YouTube denying he had helped him and saying he “came here out of my own will,” prosecutors said.

In November 2015, an unidentified person via an instant messaging platform contacted one of El-Goarany’s relatives to report that he had been killed fighting in Syria, prosecutors said.

They said that person provided the relative with photographs of a note from El-Goarany that said “if you’re reading this then know that I’ve been killed in battle and am now with our Lord InshaAllah.”

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell)