Sounds like he went to the cops a couple of months ago and got tossed in the loony bin for his trouble.
Which probably means that he’s a BSer. That is, they start asking him who, where, and when he was being threatened and he can’t tell them anything. With a lot of these nuts, their story changes continually and they wind up being put on a 72-hour psych hold because they seem unbalanced. A lot of times, the cops don’t want to release them just to have them immediately go do something crazy but they just don’t have enough to hold them on anything either, hence the 72-hour psych hold. It can be a tough situation.
I’m seriously doubting this guy was ever in the military unless he washed out of boot camp and didn’t give his ID back.
I just saw a link to the Daily Mail. So he was in the military for a year and was honorably discharged. That tells me that he probably got out on a psych. If he got kicked out for misconduct or just being an incurable F-up, it wouldn’t be honorable, it would be general or administrative or OTH (other-than-honorable) or something like that.
And from the story in the Daily Mail, it’s a lot more believable that he did this because he was pissed-off over an argument with people on his flight than he was being “forced” to fight for ISIS. There’s plenty of egghead volunteers, they don’t need to force people to do it.