London: A 34-year-old British Muslim mother has been jailed for two and a half years by a UK court for lying to authorities and trying to take her children, including an 11-month-old baby, to be raised in Islamic State-held territory in Syria.
Muslim convert Lorna Moore was found guilty of failing to tell authorities her husband Sajid Aslam, 34, was about to leave for Syria to join Islamic State (ISIS), Old Bailey court in London ruled yesterday.
She was also found guilty of plans to take her three young children to the war zone, including an 11-month-old baby.
“One of the troubling things about you is your facility for telling lies,” Judge Charles Wide said in his ruling, adding that she had told “lie after lie”.
Moore was convicted alongside 28-year-old Ayman Shaukat, who was found guilty of preparing terrorist acts by helping Aslam and Muslim convert 22-year-old Alex Nash on their way to ISIS territory.
Nash’s wife, 24-year-old Kerry Thomason, was pregnant when she was stopped from flying out with her two children to join her husband in Syria.
The judge described her as “naive” and sentenced her to two years imprisonment, suspended for two years with a supervision order and six-month tagged curfew between 6pm and 6am.
Shaukat was jailed for a total of 10 years with a five-year extended licence, while Nash was jailed for five years with a one-year additional licence.
The additional licence would mean they would be under surveillance even after they are released.
Moore had claimed her relationship with Aslam had ended after he became abusive and they only lived together for the sake of the children, who are now aged three, nine and 10. She had told the jury she would never put her children’s lives in danger because “they mean the world to me”.
“She thought too much of her youngsters to take them over there. How would you be feeling if it happened to your daughter. It’s a very difficult time, what else could it be,” her father, Noel Moore, said after the ruling.
“It was a miscarriage of justice, it couldn’t be anything else, my daughter didn’t know where the man was going,” he added. British police say 12 people from the same West Midlands area of England went to Syria or tried to do so at the same time as this group in 2014.
Two of the men who made it to Syria have since died, while the whereabouts of others remains unclear.
