Parent’s shock at photos of ‘jihadi’ son in prison
GAUNT and lying on the floor of a squalid, overcrowded jail in northern Syria, British jihadi Jack Letts was recently filmed among dozens of other Islamic State (IS) prisoners who have been captured by Kurdish militia.
The 23-year-old Muslim convert from Oxfordshire, who declared himself an “enemy of Britain” and fled to the Middle East to join IS, has been stripped of his UK citizenship.
His mother, Sally Lane, has pleaded for him to be allowed to return and face trial in the UK so he can be rescued from the conditions in which he is being held, but the British Home Office has dismissed her plea.
Seeing the first images of Letts in his cell since he was taken prisoner two years ago, she told The Mail on Sunday: “It’s heart-rending to see your son like this, and to feel so completely powerless. We have been pressing the Red Cross for months to tell us what the jail is really like, but they always refuse, saying that to release this information would jeopardise their access. I suppose I always hoped Jack was exaggerating, but now it’s clear that he wasn’t – and that it’s worse than my worst nightmares.”
Letts left his comfortable, middle-class life in Britain for the brutal
“caliphate” run by the IS terrorist group in 2014. He denies ever being a fighter. After denouncing IS as “un-Islamic” in social media posts, he managed to escape from the caliphate’s capital, Raqqa, in May 2017. Since then he has been held by the Kurdish YPG militia at the prison in the photos – believed to be in Qamishli. He has not been charged or put on trial.
In occasional letters to his parents sent via the Red Cross, Letts has described how he is being held in a mass cell, with almost no furniture, where it is boiling in summer and freezing in winter, with no access to the outdoors, and little opportunity to wash.
Lane and her husband, organic farmer John Letts, were convicted at the Old Bailey in June of supporting terrorism by sending Jack £223 in 2015, and found not guilty for trying to wire him a further £1 500 to pay a people smuggler to try to get him out. They were given suspended sentences.
In one of his last acts as Home Secretary, Chancellor Sajid Javid revoked Letts’s UK citizenship earlier this year. Letts is still a citizen of Canada, where his father comes from.
Lane, 57, saw her son in the photo last week, after the Kurds allowed TV stations on both sides of the Atlantic to broadcast from the jail. He was shown at the start of a report by the
US network, CBS.
Speaking about the devastating impact, she said: “I was horrified. He had told us there were 35 being held in his cell and prisoners were forced to lie on the floor. He said in his last letter he was never allowed out or to see the sun, and we must assume that must be true as well.”
John, 58, added: “It’s very difficult to see a photo of the son you love, and took care of for 18 years, sleeping half-naked on a concrete floor crammed in a room with so many others, equally emaciated and suffering. Is this really the best way for our democracy to deal with this issue?”
The soldier-turned-Tory MP Crispin Blunt, a former chairperson of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, visited the prison last month and was able to meet Jack.
“He was brought to see me in a visitors’ facility, and the conditions he described are confirmed by the photographs. He was wearing prison uniform but he couldn’t speak freely, because the prison governor was sitting next to us.”
Blunt said detaining thousands of IS captives from 54 countries was imposing an “intolerable burden” on the Kurds, who had “done most of the dying in achieving victory over IS”, but who had very limited resources, and it was time to let the prisoners return to their countries of origin.
A Home Office source said: “Jihadi Jack signed up to join people who hate this country, hate our beliefs and hate our way of life. His parents, who have been convicted of funding terrorism by the British courts, are wasting their breath.
“Law-abiding Brits will think he’s got off easy in that squalid prison. The thousands of victims of Jack’s terrorist friends weren’t that lucky.”