I’m still her father.. our door will always be open
Convert who married fighter believed to be in Syrian camp
THE Scots father of a Muslim convert who is feared to have joined Isis has pleaded for his daughter to be given a “second chance”.
Oban-born John Brown – a former paratrooper in the British Army – has not heard from Natalie Bracht for several years.
In her last dramatic phone call, Bracht told her parents she was in Hungarian capital Budapest, with three of her seven children and a group of Muslims who had taken away her passport.
John said yesterday: “She sounded scared. She told me, ‘Please pick me up, I’m on my way to the Austrian border. If they find me, they’ll kill me.’”
John added: “We have forgiven her. I’m still her father and the door is always open. Everybody deserves a second chance.”
Hungary is part of an overland route used by many jihadists from Europe to reach Syria undetected.
Bracht is believed to have become the second wife of Celso Rodrigues Da Costa, an Isis fighter from London.
Da Costa, 31, had already travelled to Syria with his first wife, British-born Reema Iqbal, before starting to recruit others to the Isis cause through social media.
He later took a third wife, a German called Sabina Tafilovic.
Bracht, who police say suffers from a personality disorder, is now thought to be among a group of western women held in Kurdish-controlled camps in northern Syria. The fate of her three children remains unclear.
She holds dual British German citizenship after the marriage of her Scots-born father to her German mother.
She grew up in Germany, where her devout Christian parents now live but later moved to the UK.
In 2008, Bracht hit the headlines when she ran away from her home in Sunderland with her then five daughters, fearing they were about to be taken into care.
She was arrested more than a month later in Munich, where her daughters – then aged between five and 13 – were removed from her care.
The separation appears to have prompted her to turn to other Muslims in Germany for help, including a man who would later father two more of her children.
Intelligence sources believe Bracht ended up in Syria towards the end of 2014.