London: Britain's senior-most Indian-origin Cabinet minister, Priti Patel, on Sunday ruled out the prospect of British Islamic State (ISIS) recruit Shamima Begum returning to the UK under her watch as home secretary.
Begum, who was 15-years-old when she secretly fled her home in east London, in 2015 to join the terrorist group is now living in a camp run by Kurdish forces in Northern Syria.
She has repeatedly begged British authorities to permit her to return, even if that meant imprisonment in a UK jail.
"Our job is to keep our country safe. We don't need people who have done harm and left our country to be part of a death cult and to perpetrate that ideology," Patel told 'The Sun on Sunday'.
"We cannot have people who would do us harm allowed to enter our country and that includes this woman," she said, in reference to Begum.
Under British law a person can have their citizenship revoked but they cannot be made stateless.
Patel's predecessor, British Pakistani Sajid Javid, had withdrawn Begum's British citizenship due to her Bangladeshi roots, something she has upheld this week.
Patel also recalled being threatened with a knife by an armed thug on her own doorstep and said the man pulled out his blade when she asked a group of young people smoking on her garden wall to move so she could enter her home.
By Aditi Khanna
