Shamima Begum BANNED from re-entering UK as appeal against removing ISIS bride’s citizenship denied over terror threat
SHAMIMA Begum has been banned from returning to Britain after her citizenship appeal was denied today.
The former jihadi bride, now 23, will not be able to win back her British passport after a court dismissed her appeal on all grounds.
In the judge’s ruling, it was revealed that a top secret closed judgement potentially detailing the threat that Shamima poses to the UK will be kept under wraps.
She was just 15 when she left her home in Bethnal Green, East London, with two school pals to join the bloodthirsty terror group in Syria.
Shamima was then found nine months pregnant in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019 – and stripped of her British citizenship on national security grounds by Sajid Javid.
She has been locked in a legal battle with the government for years – and recently challenged the Home Office over the decision.
Supporters claimed she was a victim of trafficking – but the government said she went to Syria with her “eyes wide open” and was a danger to society.
The decision to keep her out of Britain was announced by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission on Wednesday after a five-day hearing in November last year.
Judge Robert Jay dismissed the 23-year-old’s appeal on all grounds.
Giving the tribunal’s decision, he said “reasonable people will differ” over the circumstances of the case.
But he said the Commission found the Home Office acted correctly after considering “all the circumstances” and sifting through “voluminous material”.
The Home Office said they were “pleased” the court ruled in favour of the government.
And a Downing Street spokesman said the government “will will always ensure the safety and security of the UK and will not allow anything to jeopardise this”.
Sajid Javid said he welcomed the court’s decision to “uphold my decision” to strip Shamima of her British citizenship.
“This is a complex case but home secretaries should have the power to prevent anyone entering our country who is assessed to pose a threat to it,” he said.
British Army veteran Alan Duncan, who fought against the Islamic State in Syria, agreed the court had made “the right decision”.
“She made her choice, she made her bed, she can now lie in it,” the former minister told The Sun Online.
“This wasn’t only about Shemima Begum, it would have been an opener to all ISIS brides. We’d be opening the floodgates. People are forgetting that.
“She will try again to get back, she has a lot of people backing her. Begum isn’t a distraction. As far as I’m concerned, brilliant job the court, and well done the government.”
Speaking after the ruling, Daniel Furner, one of Shamima’s lawyers, said her legal fight is “nowhere near over”.
At the hearing last year, Shamima’s lawyers argued she was “recruited, transported, transferred, harboured and received in Syria for the purposes of ‘sexual exploitation’ and ‘marriage’ to an adult male”.
They said the Home Office unlawfully failed to consider that she travelled to Syria and remained there “as a victim of child trafficking”.
But Sir James Eadie KC, for the department, said Britain’s security services “continue to assess that Ms Begum poses a risk to national security”.
Speaking ahead of the appeal judgement, veterans’ affairs minister Johnny Mercer said Shamima “clearly represents a threat”.
But Amnesty International’s Steve Valdez-Symonds described the court decision as “disappointing”.
“The Home Secretary shouldn’t be in the business of exiling British citizens by stripping them of their citizenship,” he said.
“The power to banish a citizen like this simply shouldn’t exist in the modern world, not least when we’re talking about a person who was seriously exploited as a child.”
Shamima is currently living at a camp in northern Syria following the collapse of the ISIS “Caliphate” – where she is now likely to remain.
She travelled to ISIS capital Raqqa in February 2015 where she married Dutch jihadi Yago Riedijk – who was aged 21 at the time.
Previous reports have claimed she was a member of the brutal ISIS religious police, carried an AK-47 on street patrols and sewed suicide bombers into their explosive vests.
Earlier this month, she made a fresh bid for sympathy in a new BBC documentary – but also admitted it was “exciting” being smuggled into Syria to join gun-toting killers.
The ISIS bride told how she and her two pals flew from Gatwick to Istanbul, where an ISIS handler waited with them for a bus.
After arriving in Gaziantep near the Syrian border, they met ISIS smuggler Mohammed Rasheed – who was also allegedly selling information to Canadian spies.
Shamima said they switched cars “about seven times” before crossing into the ISIS badlands.
She claimed she “did not know” about ISIS atrocities – such as the filmed beheadings of British aid workers – before she left London.
