‘I was groomed’: Shamima Begum insists she ‘didn’t hate Britain’ when she fled to Syria – and now wants to face trial in UK
Shamima Begum, the Bethnal Green schoolgirl who fled to Syria and joined IS, has told Sky News she was groomed by friends and older men she met online before joining the terror group.
Speaking from a prison camp in Syria, Begum said she wanted to go on trial in the UK and invited British officials to question her in prison.
And she said that when she left the UK in 2015 she “didn’t hate Britain”, but hated her life as she felt “very constricted”.
In a wide-ranging interview, Begum spoke about her experiences with Islamic State and life in Syria.
Begum, now 22, said she wanted to go on trial in the UK
“Can I keep my mask on?” Shamima Begum asks before the interview starts. “I’m looking ugly today.”
Begum now speaks with a soft American twang and little trace of her east London upbringing.
She wears yoga leggings, a pink sweatshirt, black baseball cap and a small handbag across her chest.
In almost any other context, she would be utterly unremarkable, but this is a prison camp in northeast Syria and Begum, now free of her strict black Islamic State dress, remains a captive of her notorious past.
She left home in London aged 15 for the promise of paradise, instead she found “hell, hell on Earth”.
Begum rejects accusations that she carried out atrocities as part of IS as “all completely false”.
“I’m willing to fight them in a court of law but I’m not being given a chance.”
She wants to do that in Britain but expects to go to prison even though the only crime she admits to committing is travelling to Syria itself.
Begum now believes she was groomed for “weeks and weeks and maybe even months and months. It wasn’t just a decision I made very quickly, it was a decision I thought about for a while.”
“I didn’t hate Britain, I hated my life really,” she said. “I felt very constricted, and I felt I couldn’t live the life that I wanted in the UK as a British woman.”
She told Sky’s Alistair Bunkall: ‘I didn’t hate Britain, I hated my life really. I felt very constricted.’
There is a childlike shyness to her, still. She rarely makes eye contact as we talk, often looking downwards and away; she interlinks her hands down by her waist, unconsciously closing her body a little as she answers my questions.
Perhaps she is a good actress, turning it on for the camera, but my instinct is that she is every bit as young and naive as you might expect of her 22 years. Naive, but not necessarily innocent.
Begum and I walk around al Roj camp together – mud and sand streets lined by white tents provided by the UN.
Begum is worried about recent fires, scared that her high profile will make her a target for inmates wanting to make a name for themselves.
“For a long time it [the camp] wasn’t violent but for some reason it’s become more scary to live here.
“Maybe the women have got tired of waiting for something,” she reasons.
We talk about her family – she misses them but doesn’t currently speak to them: “I don’t think they failed me, in a way I failed them. When the time is right, I want to reconcile.”
Begum said: ‘It’s hard to think about a future when everyone tells you that you’re not going to go back’
I ask her about her future: “It’s hard to think about a future when everyone tells you that you’re not going to go back.”
And she brings up her Dutch husband, the father of her three dead children, who fought for Islamic State and recently spoke about their “beautiful life” together.
Are they still officially married? “Yes.”
Does she sympathise with him? “No.”
Does she miss him? “No.”
Begum tells me that she rarely watches television but does have a stack of books in her tent, her favourites are by the Afghan author Khalid Hosseini. “I re-read the Kite Runner but I don’t know why people keep giving me books about war.”
By herself, she eats dried noodles, but is “having friends round to her tent for supper tomorrow night”. She won’t cook herself, instead she will buy it in from another woman on camp.
“I have hopes and dreams, things I want to do, to see,” she says, but won’t expand when I push her.
One of her friends, a Dutch prisoner called Hafedda Haddouch, tells me Begum often hides away in her tent for weeks. But Begum insists she’s not suicidal, when I ask her.
Begum and Bunkall walked around al Roj camp together – mud and sand streets lined by white tents provided by the UN
The small group of women are clearly Shamima’s support. They giggle and pose for photos, as vain as you would expect of anyone that age.
For some, Begum is a cause célèbre, unfairly imprisoned without trial and an example of a heartless Conservative government. For others, she is a terrorist, who still poses a threat to national security and should never be allowed back into the country of her birth.
Such is the visceral hatred of many in that quarter, you wonder whether a return to the UK would be wise at all for Begum.
Bangladesh, the country with which the UK claims she held dual-nationality, has rejected any association with her.
“There is no Plan B,” is her answer when I ask what she will do if the British government doesn’t reverse its position and reinstate her citizenship.
Shamima Begum was 15 when she fled to Syria
Have any British officials or lawyers visited her in prison? “Never” she claims.
Her opinion towards the media is conflicted – she blames past interviews and reporting “100%” for her current limbo, but also believes a high profile remains her only hope of release. There’s probably some truth in both those positions.
Almost a third of Shamima Begum’s life has now been lived in Syria. She is being held in prison, for an indeterminate amount of time, but hasn’t yet stood trial. That much is fact.
If she had been repatriated the day the caliphate fell, she might already be some considerable way through a guilty sentence, but the British government decided she was a risk to national security, a decision the Supreme Court upheld.
She has been disowned by the country she grew up in, cut off from the family she grew up with, and is now part of a prison population that is becoming an increasingly unsustainable burden on the Kurdish authorities who guard them.
Shamima Begum is the woman that nobody wants, and she knows it. When she closes her eyes at night she says she is haunted by “my children dying, the bombings, the constant running, my friends dying”.
Begum has already been judged, albeit only in court of public opinion, and for now, she is going nowhere.
The Shamima Begum interview was produced by Andrew Drury and Zein Ja’far and filmed by Jake Britton.
UK
Madeleine McCann case: Sky News tracks down woman at centre of hit-and-run theory investigated by police
A woman investigated over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has told Sky News she was shocked by the police interest in her.
Portuguese and British police investigated the German woman seven years ago while their focus was on a theory Madeleine woke up, got out of her family’s Praia da Luz holiday apartment through an unlocked patio door and was killed in a hit-and-run accident.
This was just before Christian B emerged as the prime suspect over the three-year-old British girl’s disappearance in 2007. He is expected to be released from a German jail next week at the end of a sentence for raping an elderly woman in Praia da Luz in 2005.
The German woman said she was not aware she had been under suspicion
The hit-and-run theory was leaked to Portugal‘s Correio da Manha newspaper in June. It didn’t identify the woman, but the report suggested the investigation fizzled out because German authorities refused to get involved and deploy an undercover detective to befriend the suspect.
We tracked down the German woman, and she said she was not aware she had been under suspicion.
She told us she’d been working in a restaurant near the beach in Praia da Luz and got home after the time Madeleine was discovered missing from her bed. Her British partner was a chef at the Ocean Club who had served dinner to the McCanns and their friends.
“I don’t even know if there was a car accident, because I was working,” she said. “I came home at half ten, and my boyfriend was home already.”
Their flat, like the homes of many residents, was searched by Portuguese police in the days after Madeleine vanished.
‘Do you think I’ve cut her up?’
The German woman said she got angry during a second search when she was asked to empty her freezer and asked a police officer: “Do you think I’ve cut her up in little pieces and I’m going to have her for dinner?”
The woman said that more than 10 years later, German police contacted her, but only to ask her if she knew Christian B and had seen him near the McCanns’ apartment.
The German woman said she was unaware about press reports on her
She said: “They wanted to know if I ever saw this German bloke around this area where I was living for a long time. Other people obviously saw his van, but I never saw it.”
The woman told us a German police commissar – equivalent to an inspector – called her several times over more than a year.
He asked for the SIM card from a phone she used when she was living in Portugal. That might suggest the officer was fishing for more than information about Christian B.
Christian B raped an elderly woman in Praia da Luz in 2005
Local reports alleged the woman may have borrowed a car, but she said: “Do you think I ran her over? I didn’t even have a car at the time.”
She was unaware of the Portuguese newspaper report in June until we told her.
“Why didn’t my friends tell me and call me about this?” she said.
The family of the woman’s British partner, who has since died, told us they had been questioned by detectives from Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange, which is supporting the German and Portuguese police investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance.
The tapas restaurant where the McCanns ate on the night Madeleine went missing
The German woman said her British partner served the McCanns at the restaurant
When asked about the investigation into the German woman, a Met Police spokesperson said: “We continue to support Madeleine’s family to understand what happened on the evening of 3 May 2007 in Praia da Luz. This includes working with our colleagues in Germany and Portugal.
“Our thoughts remain with the family and it would be inappropriate to comment further while enquiries continue.”
Christian B warned not to return to Portugal
The night before Madeleine’s disappearance, her parents said she had woken up crying, and the next day she had asked where they had been. Part of the hit-and-run theory is that she might have gone looking for them.
But Madeleine’s mother, Kate, has long dismissed the suggestion that her daughter managed to get out of the apartment alone.
Madeleine McCann went missing on 3 May 2007
In her book entitled Madeleine, she wrote: “To give any credence whatsoever to the idea Madeleine could have walked out on her own you would have to accept that she had gone out the back way, pulling aside the sitting room curtains and drawing them again, then opening the patio door, the child safety gate at the top of the stairs on the veranda and the little gate to the road – and carefully closing all three behind her.
“What three-year-old do you know who would do that?”
Kate McCann dismissed the theory her daughter left the apartment by herself
It appears police played down the hit-and-run theory when their case against Christian B began to look more promising.
Christian B remains under investigation and has been warned not to return to Portugal when he is freed from jail.
Ex-pat Ken Ralphs, who knew the German drifter at the time Madeleine vanished, told us: “I think he’s a danger to society.
“It’s going to make a lot of children and women feel vulnerable again. He’s an injurious monster as far as I’m concerned.”
Ken Ralphs says if Christian B returns to the Algarve ‘I’ll be watching him 24/7’
Mr Ralphs, a former community campaigner from Stockport, told Sky News last year about a mutual friend, a fellow Briton, who claimed to have got involved in a plot with Christian B, a convicted child sex offender.
The alleged plan, a week before Madeleine vanished, was to steal a child to sell to a childless couple.
All three men were part of an off-grid community living in camper vans near Praia da Luz when Madeleine vanished.
Madeleine was taken from her family’s apartment while her parents dined in the resort restaurant
Mr Ralphs, who lives outside Luz, said: “Christian wouldn’t be welcomed back by many people here. I’m not worried about him personally, but there are others who are concerned. If he turns up here, I’ll be watching him 24/7.”
Christian B, 48, who cannot be fully identified under German privacy laws, is thought by investigators to have kidnapped and murdered Madeleine, but he hasn’t been charged and denies any involvement.
Christian B ‘will be forever connected with Madeleine case’
Mr Ralphs’ damning view of the suspect echoes that of the German prosecutor investigating the Madeleine case.
Hans Christian Wolters said a psychiatrist had assessed Christian B as dangerous and “similar crimes, especially sexual offences, are to be expected from him again”.
“We do consider him very dangerous and assume there is a risk of reoffending,” he said.
He added: “For us, he is still the only suspect in the case. We continue to assume that he is responsible for her [Madeleine] disappearance and ultimately also for her death.”
Ahead of Christian B’s release, the German authorities are to try to persuade a judge to impose restrictions on him: an electronic tag, a curfew, a fixed address or even a travel ban.
Christian B is due to be released from jail next week
The Portuguese lawyer who represented Christian B when he was convicted of diesel theft in the Algarve in 2006 believes he will never shake off the suspicion over Madeleine.
Read more from Sky News:
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At his office in Portimao, Serafim Vieira said: “His life is not going to be easy, not just because of the crimes he’s committed, but he’ll be forever connected with the Madeleine case, to the murder of Madeleine.
“When anyone sees him on the street, or sees his picture, they will connect him with Madeleine.”
UK
890 people arrested at Palestine Action protest yesterday – including 17 on suspicion of assaulting police officers
The Metropolitan Police has said 890 people were arrested at a protest against the banning of Palestine Action as a terror group on Saturday – including 17 on suspicion of assaulting officers.
A total of 857 individuals were arrested in Parliament Square in London under the Terrorism Act 2000 over alleged offences, the force said.
It added that a further 33 were arrested for other offences, with 17 of those detained on suspicion of assaulting officers. The Met Police did not say what the other 16 arrests were for.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart, who led the policing operation, thanked Met Police officers for their “professionalism and tireless work despite the level of abuse that they faced”.
Pic: PA
Ms Smart said: “The violence we encountered during the operation was coordinated and carried out by a group of people, many wearing masks to conceal their identity, intent on creating as much disorder as possible.
“Many of those individuals have now been arrested and we have begun securing charges.”
Defend Our Juries, which organised the demonstrations, insisted the rally was “the picture of peaceful protest”.
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‘Do I look like a terrorist?’ nurse at protest asks Sky News
Ms Smart also claimed that the “contrast between this demonstration and the other protests we policed yesterday, including the Palestine Coalition march attended by around 20,000 people, was stark”.
She added: “You can express your support for a cause without committing an offence under the Terrorism Act or descending into violence and disorder, and many thousands of people do that in London every week.
“We have a duty to enforce the law without fear or favour. If you advertise that you are intending to commit a crime, we have no option but to respond accordingly.”
Defend Our Juries previously estimated 1,500 had gathered for the rally on Saturday, where many held signs saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
Pic: PA
Pics: PA
The group has been banned as a terror group since 5 July after MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of the move proposed by then-home secretary Yvette Cooper, making it illegal to express support for the group.
It came shortly after two Voyager aircraft suffered around £7m worth of damage at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire on 20 June.
Defence Secretary John Healey told Sky’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips that he expects newly appointed Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to be “just as tough” as her predecessor on Palestine Action.
He said: “I expect her to defend the decision the government has taken to proscribe Palestine Action because of what some of its members are responsible for, and were planning for.”
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The Met Police previously said the consequences for those charged under the Terrorism Act include a maximum sentence of six months’ imprisonment.
The Home Office is set to appeal against the High Court ruling allowing Palestine Action’s co-founder, Huda Ammori, to proceed with a legal challenge against the government over the group’s ban.
Defence Secretary John Healey has told Sky News the government is considering using military barracks to house asylum seekers, as an estimated 1,000 people arrived in the UK on small boats on Saturday.
“We are looking at the potential use of military and non-military sites for temporary accommodation for the people who come across on these small boats that may not have a right to be here,” he told Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips.
“I’m looking really hard at it. I’m looking at it with the Home Office, and I recognise that the loss of confidence of the public over recent years in Britain’s ability to control its borders needs to be satisfied. And we have to deal with this problem with the small boats,” Mr Healey added.
Politics latest: Labour considers housing migrants on military sites
The measure follows widespread protests this summer over housing migrants in hotels.
Fresh small boat arrivals were spotted on Sunday, after an estimated 1,000 people arrived on Saturday – when French authorities said 24 people were rescued while trying to cross the Channel.
The figures compare to a relatively recent lull in crossings. In the previous seven days (30 August to 5 September) the Home Office recorded no small boat arrivals.
Zia Yusuf, head of policy at Reform UK, told Trevor Phillips that Britain has become a “soft touch” on migration, before suggesting between 15 and 25 detention sites will need to be built to detain asylum seekers. He described these as “purpose-built modular steel structures”.
“We can look around the world at where things have worked and worked well. President Trump stood up 3,000 detention beds in eight days. That was this year in the state of Florida – using steel modular structures,” Mr Yusuf said.
He added that the president’s crackdown has significantly reduced illegal border crossings and suggested the same could happen in the English Channel to deter migrants.
“These are unarmed, largely men in dinghies, we don’t need a particularly formidable military to be able to take them to a detention centre,” he said.
Zia Yusuf from Reform UK said he believes Britain has become a “soft touch” on migration
Shabana Mahmood will have the job of tackling illegal immigration after taking over from Yvette Cooper as home secretary on Friday – when Sir Keir Starmer carried out a major cabinet reshuffle following the resignation of his deputy prime minister Angela Rayner.
National Crime Agency (NCA) figures show record levels of disruption of immigration crime networks in 2024/25.
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Officials believe this contributed to the lowest number of boats crossing the Channel in August since 2019.
But, despite the 3,567 arrivals in August being the lowest since 2021, when looking across the whole of 2025, the figure of 29,003 is the highest on record for this point in a year.
Sky’s Political Correspondent Liz Bates said that after Labour scrapped the previous government’s controversial Rwanda policy and shut down the Bibby Stockholm barge, ministers are “hitting up against many of the same problems” with “a really broken and very slow asylum system”.
“The context to all of this is a huge shake-up at the Home Office, and I think something of an admission that [Yvette] Cooper, despite her years of experience, could not get a grip… of this problem of people coming across the Channel in small boats and then ending up in asylum hotels,” she added.
Army bases were previously used by the Conservative government, but this prompted local protests, and the sites were widely criticised for their poor conditions in some cases.
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As Sky’s Home Editor Jason Farrell writes, Ms Mahmood has become the home secretary of a country where the national flag is being hoisted as a symbol of dissatisfaction – with anger at the arrival of desperate migrants crossing the Channel in small boats.
Sir Keir’s sweeping changes
Sir Keir Starmer has announced sweeping changes to his ministerial team in the Home Office as his government works to get a grip of illegal migration to the UK.
Here’s a list of who has been moved, besides the home secretary.
Dame Angela Eagle, who was border security and asylum minister, has been moved to the environment department.
Dame Diana Johnson, who was policing and crime minister, has been moved to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
She has said in a post on X that it was an “honour” to work with police officers, and she is “delighted” to be moving to the DWP.
Dan Jarvis has been given a role in the Cabinet Office, in addition to his post as security minister in the Home Office.
And Sarah Jones, who was industry minister, has been moved to the Home Office.
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