Almost 400 Daesh Terrorists ‘Slipped Back into Britain from Iraq, Syria’

The shock figure is far lower than Ministers previously claimed and means almost 400 terrorists trained in Syria and Iraq are at large on Britain’s streets.

Experts told The Daily Mail on Sunday they could use the deadly skills with automatic weapons and bombs that they honed on the battlefield to plot atrocities such as the Paris and Brussels attacks in the UK, massacring hundreds.

Figures slipped out in Parliament reveal that the UK Home Office believes 850 Britons have travelled to fight for the Daesh terror group and although many have been killed by drone strikes and in battle, about 400 have sneaked back into the UK.

Any of them could be prosecuted as it is a crime to attend terrorist training camps and also to be a member of a banned group such as Daesh.
But Ministers admit that only 14 people who have fought for Daesh have been convicted, despite mistakenly claiming the number was 54 earlier this year.

Last night, critics urged UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd to give more money to the Border Force so it can catch terrorists as they sneak back into the country, as well as ensuring that police and MI5 have enough officers to track down those already here.

UK Labor MP Khalid Mahmood, who believes thousands of Britons have travelled to Syria and Iraq, said: ‘It is a tiny number who have been prosecuted and it’s absurd to say this is any form of success.

‘If they know who they are, they should be prosecuted but the police and security services don’t have the resources to do that.’

Professor Anthony Glees, Director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, told The Mail on Sunday that the ‘minuscule’ number of prosecutions was ‘very disturbing’.

‘These people have been trained to be killers and people will think it beggars belief [that they haven’t been prosecuted]. What message are we sending out to the world?

‘If you go out to join a regime like so-called Islamic State, you forfeit your right to come back,’ he said using an alternative name for the Daesh terrorist group.

Among the hundreds of Daesh veterans at large in the UK is Maarg Kahsay, a student who fled to Syria while awaiting trial for rape.

He spent up to two months in Daesh territory as a fighter in 2014 but then returned home and, as this newspaper revealed in the summer, is free to roam the streets of London and live in a council flat.

Another terrorist, Gianluca Tomaselli, is working as a parking attendant at an NHS hospital in London after spending up to a year fighting in Syria.

The revelation that only 14 returnees have been convicted was quietly made in a written answer given to the House of Lords.

Ministers had claimed in May that 54 terrorists had been successfully prosecuted – but last month admitted this larger figure wrongly included dozens who had been fundraising for terrorism or attempting to reach the war zone.