The British jihadi bride who recruited Shamima Begum into ISIS has been arrested in Syria after being linked to a terror attack in Germany, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Sharmeena Begum, now 27, who left her east London home for Syria as a schoolgirl in December 2014, was traced after German police investigating July’s Berlin Pride attack found she had exchanged messages with knife-man Abdul Ballout.
He is understood to have sent Sharmeena – no relation to her former schoolmate Shamima – a video of himself swearing his oath of allegiance to ISIS, which she was allegedly meant to pass to the group’s propaganda chief for release online after the attack.
Ballout went on to drive a van into the crowd and attack revellers with a machete, killing one woman and injuring 29 others, before he was shot dead by police marksmen after a 24-hour manhunt.
The BKA, Germany’s version of the FBI, are believed to have passed her number to a Western intelligence service, which tracked her to a hideout in Syria.
Last night her father, Mohammed Nizam Uddin, told this newspaper: ‘I thought she had been killed in Syria. I am relieved that she is at least alive.’
Sharmeena Begum was the first girl from Bethnal Green Academy to join Isis in Sryia
Stills taken from CCTV issued by the Metropolitan Police show Kadiza Sultana,16, Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, both 15, at Gatwick airport as they travel to Syria
Shamima was said to have been persuaded by fellow Bethnal Green Academy pupil Sharmeena to join her in Syria
‘I did not know she had been arrested. No one from the police or the Government has told me anything about her for years.’
She is expected to face trial for terrorism offences in Syria, where president Ahmed al-Sharaa – a former militant leader whose own group was a bitter rival of ISIS – has dealt harshly with its members.
If convicted, she could be executed, and in the meantime faces incarceration in the country’s brutal prison system.
Fighting back tears, Mr Uddin added: ‘What can I do? Everything is in God’s hands.
‘I won’t be able to do anything, even if I want to. I won’t be able to see her, and she will not be able to come back here, so it’s the same for me her being alive or dead. Whatever decision comes from God, will happen.’
Since the Berlin Pride attack, German investigators have uncovered attacker Ballout’s connections to the British jihadi scene.
Sharmeena Begum has been arrested in Syria after being linked to a terror attack in Germany
Sharmeena was traced after German police investigating July’s Berlin Pride attack found she had exchanged messages with gunman Abdul Ballout
Mohammad Uddin with pictures of his daughter Sharmeena Begum
German media reported that Ballout, who has a German-Lebanese background, is a nephew of Omar Bakri Muhammad, the hate preacher who founded the banned extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, whose members included Anjem Choudary and Michael Adebolajo, the murderer of Fusilier Lee Rigby.
Bakri fled Britain in 2005 back to his native Lebanon, where he was jailed for years on terrorism charges.
Last night, Professor Peter Neumann, a security expert at King’s College, London, said: ‘Ballout’s connection to Sharmeena is especially significant because she appears to be playing a very active role in ISIS right now, particularly among Western foreign fighters.
‘The fact that someone who left Britain for ISIS more than a decade ago was apparently still in contact with a recent attacker in Germany shows just how persistent these networks can be.’
Sharmeena, radicalised in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer in 2013, is said to have persuaded fellow Bethnal Green Academy pupils Shamima Begum, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana to join her in Syria in February 2015.
But while Shamima later disavowed the caliphate after its fall in early 2019, Sharmeena – who took an active operational role within the group and was regarded as extreme even by its own standards – remained unrepentant.
Officials confirmed last night that she was stripped of her British citizenship several years ago, just like Shamima, 27.
It means the British Government is under no obligation to help them.
Extradition to Germany may offer Sharmeena her only realistic hope of escaping the death penalty, should investigators there decide to pursue her over Ballout’s attack before Syria can put her on trial.
But despite exchanging messages with Ballout in the days beforehand, investigators have so far found no evidence that she helped plan the attack itself.
Her capture means all four of the Bethnal Green Academy schoolgirls who joined Isis are now accounted for, with Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase both believed to have been killed in Syria.
Shamima remains stranded and stateless in the Al-Roj camp, near Syria’s border with Iraq.
She recently mounted a fresh legal challenge to return to Britain, with lawyers arguing she was trafficked to Syria for sexual exploitation as a 15-year-old and married off to an adult Isis fighter within days of arriving.
