WAG WHO BACKED TERROR
Footballer’s girlfriend who said her views were more extreme than ISIS is guilty of sending money to jihadi group in Syria
DRESSED in black with a plunging neckline, Amaani Noor appeared in her local paper five years ago this week.
‘Our own Posh and Becks?’ was the headline over a photo of Noor and her boyfriend, an up-and-coming professional footballer.
She was just 16 then, he a year older, but the gist was that the pair looked set to follow in the footsteps of David and Victoria Beckham.
While for her boyfriend that meant conquering the world of football, Noor’s route to the top looked destined to be linked to her looks and other talents.
Clearly not shy, she’d got in touch with him through Twitter when she was just 15. Their relationship started with a cinema trip to see a horror film and progressed from there. By the time of the interview she had already made it to the semi-finals of Miss Teen Great Britain.
She also revealed how much she loved singing and acting – indeed, the following year she was said to be in the running for a role in a movie alongside Robert De Niro. It never materialised. Instead she said she’d settle for panto.
If only. Because Noor’s latest, and possibly last, public appearance has seen her in the dock at Liverpool Crown Court where yesterday she was found guilty of sending money to a terror organisation in Syria. And what emerged during the 21-year- old’s ten- day trial were extraordinary details about her journey from teen WAG glamour model wannabe to terrorist sympathiser who believed in violent jihad and life under sharia law.
Having split from her footballer boyfriend, by 2018 it was the darker side of the web that now interested her. Communicating via an encrypted messaging service, she befriended Victoria Webster, a mother of twins and recent Muslim convert from Lancashire.
Online, the pair would discuss Islamic State and their belief in sharia law. Noor signed up to social media platforms showing videos of IS fighters torturing and murdering their victims. Indeed, she would tell the court some of her views on Islam were more extreme than those of the terrorist organisation.
The pair would also discuss finding Noor a husband – someone willing to give their life to the Islamist cause. In the end Noor was successful, remotely ‘marrying’ a Syrian fighter whom she had never met in person. She wanted to join him in Syria.
‘I just feel like going over – get me backpack-ready,’ she said in a message to Webster, followed by a smileyface emoji.
On the day police raided her house in July 2018 she was preparing to head to Turkey and then on to Syria. In her defence, Noor tearfully insisted any money she sent was intended to ‘help victims, women and children’.
Clearly the jury did not believe her, convicting her of the single charge of terrorism fundraising. She and Webster, who admitted three charges of funding terrorism at an earlier hearing, will be sentenced at a later date.
Just how Noor, and indeed Webster,
‘Often showing a lot of flesh’
came to be radicalised remains something of a mystery to police. Investigating officer DCI Clare Devlin told the Daily Mail: ‘They were two young women leading seemingly innocuous lives. We simply don’t know how they took that first step. It is alarming that we don’t know the catalyst.’
One of two children born to mother Nurah, a mixed-race British woman of Somali heritage, Noor was raised in Liverpool. Her mother split from her father, a non-Muslim, shortly after she was born.
When she made that appearance in the Liverpool Echo in December 2014, the paper wrote: ‘At a time when so many teenagers attract such a bad press, this is a positive, good news story – and a love story.’
Her boyfriend was on the verge of playing first-team football and attracting attention both on and off the pitch.
Noor was studying performing arts, having left Notre Dame school aged 14. Her aim after that was to complete a two-year musical theatre course. ‘I used to love singing, but acting is now my main passion,’ she said. ‘I’d love to work in the theatre and do pantos.’
Someone who knew Noor told the Mail she was a ‘typical, feisty Scouse teenage girl’ who gave no impression of having any interest in religion.
The source said: ‘She dressed quite flashily, usually in designer labels, and she was often showing a lot of flesh. She always had her hair done and false nails and wore lots of make-up.
‘Then when she was about 17 or 18 she told everyone she wanted to be a glamour model. The agency she was with at the time didn’t do that kind of thing, so they suggested she’d be better moving on somewhere else.’
Although Noor did not refer to her boyfriend by name, in court she said he was someone ‘in the public eye’. She said they split when she was 18.
It left her feeling ‘worthless’ and thereafter she began to focus on her religion, becoming observant and studying YouTube videos. Not long after, she married a Muslim preacher from London, a match arranged by her mother. They were together for just a week before the relationship started to founder. In a YouTube video posted in February 2018 she said the marriage ‘was deemed invalid due to a technicality’.
Within months of posting that video, Noor was back online. The court heard that on two mobile phones seized by police she had installed a messaging app called Telegram. It allows users to engage in encrypted chats and leave voice notes, make calls and send files.
Among the users she communi
‘I’d love to do panto’
cated with was Webster, a 28-yearold shop assistant police believe may have been ‘self-radicalised’ on the internet.
Analysis of the phones found records of conversations between the pair, including discussions about the merits of IS and another proscribed organisation, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), described in court as Al Qaeda in Syria.
Diana Wilson, prosecuting, quizzed Noor over a message in which she suggested that neither IS nor HTS were doing enough to declare things as non-Muslim.
Judge andrew Menary asked if one interpretation might be that ‘your views were harder than IS or HTS?’ Noor replied: ‘Back in the day, yes.’
a number of videos were also found on her phone, one showing the execution of prisoners in orange jumpsuits. Noor also asked Webster if she could put her in contact with any ‘brothers’ as she ‘cannot be in this country any longer’. in april, Noor started to communicate via Telegram with someone sh she referred to as ‘Hakim my l love’, a man fighting in Syria.
The pair married by videolink o on her 20th birthday. On the s same day she joined a group on Telegram called The Merciful Hands, which has been described as being IS, at her husband’s suggestion.
On May 23, 2018, she transferred f £35 to Merciful Hands v via PayPal under a false name. O One minute after sending the money she messaged Webster, saying: ‘ So will it go to a brother who is a fighter or ex-fighter and has a family?’ Miss Wilson told the jury: ‘ She knew or had reasonable cause to suspect that the money w would or may be used to support p people fighting against the Syrian government for a political, religious or an ideological cause.’
Having first been arrested in July, Noor was re-arrested in November when two more phones were seized. On one, a deleted email sent to her fighter husband described her ‘dream’ of joining him in Syria.
in the end the police intervention prevented her from travelling. and her marriage to the jihadi fighter has since ended.