Rescue mission of Bethnal Green schoolgirl ruled out

The security minister has ruled out launching a rescue mission to Syria after an east London schoolgirl declared that she wanted to return to the UK four years after she joined Islamic State.

Ben Wallace said he would not put British lives at risk to “go and look for terrorists or former terrorists”, adding that “actions have consequences”.

His comments came after Shamima Begum gave an interview from a refugee camp in northern Syria saying she wanted to come home. She was one of three girls, along with Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, who left the UK in February 2015.

Now 19, Begum said she was nine months pregnant with her third child. Her other two children have died.

“In the end, I just could not endure any more,” she said. “Now all I want to do is come home to Britain.”

In 2017, the then independent reviewer of terrorism legislation Max Hill QC suggested allowances could be made for the return of individuals such as the Bethnal Green schoolgirls.

Speaking around a year before his appointment as director of public prosecutions, Mr Hill said it was right for security services to leave space for those who travelled out of a sense of naivety, at a young age and who return in a “state of utter disillusionment” to be diverted away from the criminal courts.

Clarifying his comments shortly after, Mr Hill stressed that he had at no time said that returning “foreign fighters” should be “welcomed rather than prosecuted”.