A SLEW of Daesh supporters will want to return to the UK if teenager Shamima Begum succeeds in doing so, said a former counter-terrorism police chief.
Scott Wilson, who was UK National Counter Terrorism Co-ordinator for Protect and Prepare until last summer, also said that security forces will end up spending years monitoring her if she returned to the UK.
"They will never be able to take their eye off her for the simple reason that they don't know what could happen,” Wilson was quoted as saying by a tabloid. “If she did do something in the UK, the Government and the security services would get the blame for it.
"It's the millions of pounds of monitoring that it's going to cause, not just the bringing her back and putting her through a deradicalisation programme."
Begum left her east London home to join the Daesh in 2015, and she recently expressed a desire to return back to the UK for the sake of her newborn third child. She was stripped of her British citizenship on February 19.
Launching a fresh appeal to be brought back to the UK, Begum said she could be an example of "how someone can change."
“I can’t do that if I am sitting here in a camp. I can’t do that for you,” she said, speaking from a refugee camp in northern Syria.
Last week, Oxford-born terror suspect Jack Letts, known as Jihadi Jack, expressed a desire to return to the UK, saying he missed his mom and Doctor Who.
Hate preacher Abu Hamza's son, Sufyan Mustafa, has also said he wants to return to the UK, despite being stripped of his British citizenship.
He is trying to appeal against the decision to take away his British citizenship.
FILE PHOTO: Floral tributes are laid following a vigil for the victims of the knife attack in Southport, Britain July 30, 2024. REUTERS/Temilade Adelaja
