‘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.
A judo Olympian has said her family is “devastated” after the discovery of body in the search for her missing brother.
Lubjana Piovesana, 28, appealed for help to find her younger sibling, Luis, 26, on Saturday. He had not been seen since the early hours of Friday morning.
A body was found in the River Frome near Napier Road in Eastville, Bristol, at around 6pm today, Avon and Somerset Police said.
Formal identification is yet to take place, the force added.
In a post on Instagram, Ms Piovesana wrote: “Hello everyone, Luis has been found.
“We are completely devastated but he has passed away.
“I am grateful for everyone’s support. And I am so sorry this happened.
“Luis was my little brother and loved by everyone. I wish he could have seen the love from everyone. He will be remembered by us all.”
The post was signed off with a dove emoji.
Luis Piovesana did not have any money or his mobile phone with him when he went missing, police said. Pics: Avon & Somerset Police
Mr Piovesana was last seen at around 3am on Friday at the Eastgate retail park, which is less than a 10-minute walk away from where the body was found.
He had travelled there by taxi from a venue in Little Ann Street, St Jude’s, a 10-minute drive away.
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The 26-year-old’s family spent the weekend searching for him, and asked people to check their sheds and gardens.
His partner, Laurin Bohler, said loved ones had travelled from Birmingham to help.
Mounted officers and police drones were also involved in the investigation.
Ms Piovesana competed for Team GB before switching to the Austrian team, and defeated British competitor Lucy Renshall in the women’s -63kg judo event at the Paris Olympics last year.
A man has been jailed for life for murdering his son’s girlfriend after she returned home from the school run.
Officers from Dyfed-Powys Police were called to an address on Bigyn Road in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, on 5 July last year.
Sophie Evans, 30, had sustained 72 separate injuries on the outside of the body, “all but three of them new injuries”.
Richard Jones, who is now 50, believed he was “being taken advantage of financially” by Ms Evans and his son, with whom she was in a relationship.
While the purpose of Jones’s visit was “purely normal”, he confronted her on that morning about his suspicions and Ms Evans’s reaction was such that Jones “lost [his] temper”.
He subjected Ms Evans to “gross violence” before ultimately strangling her and leaving the property to run errands, including ordering a new bank card and buying pastries from a bakery.
Richard Jones. Pic: Dyfed-Powys Police
‘Last time on their school run’
During sentencing on Monday, the defendant kept his head bowed for most of the hearing.
He will have to serve at least 20 years behind bars before he can be considered for release by the parole board.
Swansea Crown Court heard Ms Evans was the mother of two young children.
Passing his sentence, Judge Geraint Walters said Ms Evans “had just taken her two children for the last time on their school run” prior to the attack.
“She wasn’t to know that when she parted company with them that morning,” he added.
The court heard the Jones believed he was being defrauded by Ms Evans and his son.
“There is clear evidence, that in the days leading up to this, that you had begun harbouring thoughts that Sophie Evans and your own son were in fact financially scamming you,” he said.
“What precisely brought about that view is difficult to determine.”
Judge Walters said Jones “lost [his] temper when [he] didn’t get the answer that [he] thought [he] deserved”.
He added that, having lost his temper, the defendant “subjected [Ms Evans] to gross violence over a period of time, before you ultimately extinguished her life by strangulation”.
The court was told in evidence that at the time of the attack, Ms Evans was wearing only a bath towel.
‘The rock of our family’
In a victim personal statement, Ms Evans’s sister Kerry Quinlan told the court she was “the rock of our family”.
She said Ms Evans was taken from them in a “senseless and cruel act”.
“Words cannot express fully how much of a loss this has been to her children,” she added.
“When they cry themselves to sleep wanting their mum, she isn’t there and never will be.”
Ms Quinlan added that Jones had “taken everything from us, all in the most despicable way possible”.
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Ms Evans’s partner at the time, and the defendant’s son, Jamie Davies, said in a victim personal statement, read on his behalf, that they had both “trusted” Jones, and that Ms Evans had even been planning the defendant’s 50th birthday.
“The thought of having to live my life without Sophie causes me extreme pain and heartache,” he added.
Prosecuting, Michael Jones KC said the offence was aggravated by the defendant’s previous convictions and the fact Ms Evans was murdered in her home.
In mitigation, David Elias KC said there was a “lack of premeditation”.
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