ISIS bride Shamima Begum has been trying to line up a £35,000 deal for an interview about escaping from a prison camp in Syria, according to the journalist Andrew Drury.
Asked if she deserved sympathy, he told GB News: “Not in my view. I think the crimes that she committed whilst in Syria outweigh that – you can’t use your age at 15, when she committed the crimes in Syria. There are victims over there.
“Remember those victims. I met them in the camps. She’s known for sewing a suicide vest. She’s known for being part of the religious police. She’s got victims over there. Feel sorry for them, not for her.
“You’re then presuming that she was groomed online and this isn’t just a belief from a young age of growing up.
“This grooming word is quite complex. She didn’t sit on videos. She spoke to me. I sat on a concrete step outside a tent where she went into the situation.
“I said, were you groomed online, were you watching online videos? I’ve met her. No, she didn’t.
“This girl’s manipulative, and she’s not kind of this waify girl that the left-wing likes to portray. She’s not this nice girl, this poor little girl, poor innocent girl at school that watched nasty videos online. She’s not.”
He added: “You must be aware that some of those girls in there are still speaking to ISIS splinter cells now.
“The camp that we’re involved with, regularly, day to day, the ladies in charge of the camp said to us…some of these girls are still speaking to ISIS. They are still doing that. How do we know she’s not one of those and she’s a manipulator?
“I know her better than anybody. There’s nobody in the news media or anybody else that knows about the night I’ve sat down and spoken to – I actually sympathised with her at the beginning.
“I had that belief that she was radicalised, and over a period of three years of interviewing her, I saw what’s behind those eyes.
“She’s not this innocent character. She’s not this poor creature that’s been, I don’t know, drawn into some cult.”
He said he has been getting messages asking for money: “Generally, they’re fishing to get me to strike up a conversation with her. But the recent ones were, it started innocently, and then it went on to say, look, if you want to interview, you can be the only one that’s got Shamima when she leaves the camp, if you give 35,000, that’s what.
“That’s how it started. It started at 35,000 and then I said that you can’t. That’s immoral. You can’t do that and this, and I’m not prepared to do it.
“And then she started referring to money as mints and jelly babies, if you look at my interviews. She was saying, well, I can reduce it down to 15,000 because I’ve got somebody you can give the money to outside the camp, and then what they’ll do is they’ll then take us out the camp, get us to into Turkey, and that’s when we’ll go to where we’ll claim asylum, inside Turkey.
“We’ll go to our embassies and claim asylum, so they’ve already got somebody ready to get them out. It’s a heavy weight on my shoulders having this information, believe me.
“I didn’t want this new story to come out. I went through the process of speaking to my local MP, who did nothing, just sent me back and said speak to the police commissioner.
“I then went to the intelligence services, gave them the information. All that was was an answerphone service, they ignored me. Then I went to my mate, Richard, who’s got people in Westminster. They ignored it, both Conservative and Labour.
“We’ve got potentially people being smuggled out of prison camps. Our government don’t care. They really don’t care.”
