Shamima Begum was a London schoolgirl until Scotland Yard raised concerns she and two of her fellow pupils had travelled to Syria in February 2015. The now 23-year-old was just 15 when she travelled to Istanbul in Turkey from Gatwick Airport to join the so-called Islamic State (IS) with her close friends at Bethnal Green […]
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The Foreign Secretary has said giving Shamima Begum access to legal aid to challenge the decision to deprive her of UK citizenship would make him “very uncomfortable”. Jeremy Hunt said Ms Begum, who left the UK at the age of 15 to marry an Islamic State fighter, “knew the choices she was making”, but acknowledged […]
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Shamima Begum’s decision to go to the Islamic State was made when she was 15. No doubt, she was a young person who was influenced by what she consumed through slick Islamic State propaganda online. She was vulnerable to being drawn into the propaganda and those working on extremism realise that those personal vulnerabilities involve […]
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Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and their Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners have agreed a plan to strip some Germans who fight for the Islamic State militant group of their citizenship, a German newspaper reported on Sunday. More than 1,000 Germans have left their country for war zones in the Middle East since 2013 and the […]
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Floodgates could be opened for Islamic State supporters coming back to the UK if Shamima Begum succeeds in getting back into the country, a former counter-terrorism police chief has warned. Scott Wilson, who helped lead the response to the 2017 London Bridge attack, said monitoring the teenager would cost millions of pounds and the security […]
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Islamic State bride Shamima Begum said she regrets speaking to the media and wishes she had found a different way to contact her family. The teenager, who fled London aged 15 to join Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria, has said she wants to return to the UK with her newborn son. Ms Begum, who […]
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The family of Islamic State bride Shamima Begum have written to the Home Secretary asking for his help to bring her newborn son to Britain. The letter to Sajid Javid said the baby boy was a “true innocent” who should not “lose the privilege of being raised in the safety of this country”. The teenager, […]
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Islamic State bride Shamima Begum, who fled to Syria aged 15, is not a Bangladeshi citizen and will be barred from entering the country, its foreign ministry has said. The 19-year-old from London said she wanted to return to the UK with her newborn baby, with the end of the so-called caliphate in Syria within […]
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A teenage girl who fled Britain to join Islamic State has compared the Manchester Arena bombing to military assaults on Syria. In an interview with the BBC, Shamima Begum, now 19, said the deaths of 22 innocent people in the terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in 2017 were akin to the “women and […]
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An east London schoolgirl who left Britain as a 15-year-old to join the Islamic State group is now heavily pregnant and wants to come home. Shamima Begum was tracked down by The Times to a refugee camp in northern Syria where she is now 19-years-old, the bride of an Islamic State fighter, nine months pregnant […]
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