Facing jail, the white mothers seduced by IS
They plotted to take children to Syria
THEY were raised in ordinary British families by parents with Christian values.
But trainee maths teacher Lorna Moore and fellow Muslim convert Kerry Thomason disowned the UK and plotted to take their children to Syria to join Islamic State.
The pair were part of a terror cell in the West Midlands dubbed the Walsall Jihadis, which hoped to supply IS with the next generation of wives and fighters.
Three pregnant women in the group, including 24-year- old Thomason, wanted to reach Syria so they could have their children under IS rule.
The full facts can be reported for the first time after two members of the group were found guilty of terrorism offences yesterday. At a previous hearing, prosecutor Mark Dawson said one of the pregnant women tried to travel to Syria because ‘her aim was to give birth in the Islamic State – not Walsall’.
A source close to the investigation said it was the first time that a group of UK pregnant women had been caught trying to flee to Syria.
‘They are willing to risk the poor healthcare of a warzone just so their babies grow up under Islamic State,’ he said.
‘The influence of their controlling husbands is another factor.’
Moore, who was raised by Protestant parents in Northern Ireland, was found guilty of failing to tell the authorities that her husband Sajid Aslam, 34, was planning to join the terror group.
The 33-year-old graduate was on holiday with her parents and three children – now aged three, nine and ten – at Butlins in Skegness when supply teacher Aslam fled to Syria in 2014. Moore was later arrested and found to be planning to join him.
Thomason was held in February 2015 on the day she was due to fly to Turkey with her two children, hoping to reach Syria.
‘The whole world
is against us’
Her husband Isaiah Siadatan joined IS the previous year.
Thomason, who pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to assisting her husband, was brought up in a quiet Birmingham suburb where her family are ‘ shellshocked’ by her actions.
Her husband was born to an Italian mother and an Iranian father and grew up on a farm in Kent before attending Blue Coat CofE secondary school in Walsall. He is thought to have died aged 24 fighting for IS.
His former school friend Jacob Petty, the son of Church of England minister Sue Boyce, has also been killed in Syria.
Petty, 25, who called himself Abu Yaqoob Britany, converted to Islam at the age of 15. In August 2014 he rang his mother from Turkey to say he was about to cross the border into Syria to carry out aid work. She begged him not to go to the warzone.
But months later, he sent her an email saying: ‘Since becoming a Muslim I have never been happy living in the UK.
‘Nobody has been brainwashed or tricked, I am training to be a soldier because the whole world are united against us.’
Another member of the Walsall Jihadis was Alex Nash, who had been his school’s head boy and regularly attended church before converting to Islam aged 19. In 2014 he and his wife Yousma Jan travelled to Turkey where they were arrested in Gaziantep, close to the Syrian border.
Nash, 22, pleaded guilty to preparing for terrorism at an earlier hearing. A charge against Miss Jan has been dropped.
Yesterday a jury at the Old Bailey also found Ayman Shaukat, 27, guilty of two counts of preparing terrorism acts.
Law graduate Shaukat, a key player in a community group called Islam Walsall, drove Aslam to the airport so he could travel to Syria, as well as Nash and his wife.
Moore, Shaukat, Nash and Thomason will be sentenced at a later date. Judge Charles Wide granted Moore conditional bail out of concern for her children but told her she should have ‘no expectations raised’.