SYDNEY, Australia — An Australian electrician who tested rockets and propellants on his farm and sent his findings to the Islamic State through an encrypted app was sentenced to nine years in prison on Friday by a court in Australia.

Haisem Zahab, 44, pleaded guilty last year to knowingly providing support or resources to a terrorist organization. He also admitted that he refused to help the police access encrypted data on his phone and other devices.

Mr. Zahab could have faced 25 years in prison. When Supreme Court Justice Geoffrey Bellew handed down the sentence in a Sydney courtroom, members of Mr. Zahab’s family began to cry, with some saying “Thank God” in Arabic. He will be eligible for parole in late 2023.

Prosecutors said Mr. Zahab spent months researching laser-guided weapons on his farm in a western area of the state of New South Wales. They said he hoped to provide the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, with technology that could warn the militants of an imminent missile strike by detecting lasers or radar being used to target them.

He also designed rockets and created propellant formulas, prosecutors said. Mr. Zahab created a 288-page document containing his analysis and findings, including digital photos showing the construction process for devices he built himself, and sent it to an unidentified member of the terrorist group using an encrypted messaging app, prosecutors said.

An expert testified at his trial that armaments found at ISIS sites in Iraq and Syria bore similarities to some of Mr. Zahab’s designs.

Prosecutors said Mr. Zahab became enamored with the Islamic State after its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the formation of a caliphate in June 2014 and urged Muslims to travel to northern Iraq and Syria to join its ranks.

Mr. Zahab maintained at least two Twitter accounts and posted thousands of tweets about the Islamic State, sharing anti-Western and pro-Islamic State images and GIFs and expressing anger over the use of airstrikes and drones against ISIS. He made contact with a network of online Islamic State supporters, including Junaid Hussain, an influential hacker from Birmingham, England, who was killed in a missile strike in Raqqa, Syria, in 2015.

Prosecutors said Mr. Zahab was encouraged to use private messaging apps. He installed the Surespot app and was directed to use it for messages from Samata Ullah, a self-taught British computer expert who was arrested in Wales in 2016.

Mr. Ullah was later charged with six terrorism offenses, including training people in the use of encrypted apps, and was sentenced to eight years in prison after admitting to being a member of the Islamic State.

Damien Spleeters, a Belgium-based researcher who has traveled to Iraq and Syria to investigate the provenance of weapons used by the Islamic State, testified at Mr. Zahab’s trial that he found fuel propellants and rockets at ISIS workshops that mirrored what he later learned were Mr. Zahab’s designs. The terror group, he said, was manufacturing its own rockets and its own fuel.

“What we saw is that some of the pictures I took of some of the rockets I found in Iraq are actually quite close to some of the designs,” Mr. Spleeters said in an interview. “The research he has done was pretty close to what ISIS used in the field, it was the same precursors of chemicals used to make explosives.”

Australian Federal Police officers interviewed Mr. Spleeters about his research in London in June of last year. That was more than a year after Mr. Zahab’s arrest. Justice Bellew said in his ruling on Friday that the defendant’s use of encryption prolonged the investigation by nearly a year.

When investigators searched Mr. Zahab’s farm in the town of Young in February 2017, they found bags of potassium nitrate, which can be used to make propellant, and containers of ammonium persulphate, which can be used to make electronic circuitry.

Justice Bellew said he was not convinced by Mr. Zahab’s statement that he had renounced the Islamic State. Mr. Zahab said that he had been caught up in an internet bubble and had seen the terrorist group as a force for good.

Asked on Friday whether he believed Mr. Zahab had genuinely de-radicalized, his brother, Tarek Zahab said: “I don’t think he was radicalized at all.”

“Anyone who’s indulged in the internet life and social media can get sucked in very easily, I think 99.9 percent of humanity was immersed in that at the time of the conflict and still are,” he said. He added that his brother would have to live with the stigma of ISIS for the rest of his life.

“To go on record and plead guilty to something like that, and have a slogan like this put on your shoulders, it’s not going to be an easy process to get through life, finding work, et cetera,” he said. “I think that is more damaging than serving time, to be honest.”

Follow Jamie Tarabay on Twitter: @jamietarabay

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