Why Won’t Britain Stop White Jihadis in the Suburbs? – By Nico Hines (dailybeast.com) / Nov 17 2017
Terrorist’s Family Asks Why Won’t Britain Stop Hub of ‘White Jihadis’ Around a Single Suburban Town?
The family of a dead jihadi demands to know why boys in one of Britain’s comfortable commuter towns are being radicalized and allowed to travel to join terrorist militias.
11.17.17 7:44 AM ET
HIGH WYCOMBE, England—An extraordinary clutch of white jihadis groomed in the suburban commuter towns northwest of London have traveled from Britain to join the terrorist militias of Syria, Iraq, and East Africa over the past decade.
The devastated family of one of these radicalized converts is now demanding to know why Britain’s security services continue to allow this to happen.
Six years after 21-year-old Thomas Evans—who was already on the authorities’ radar—was allowed to slip through a London airport en route to join al Shabaab in Somalia, his family say they have never been approached by intelligence-agency officials who might have been able to crush a growing problem of jihadi recruitment centered around High Wycombe, the mid-size suburban town where the Evans family lives.
A dozen young men are feared to have joined ISIS from Wycombe in the past few years. Three of the men accused of planning the trans-Atlantic liquid bomb plot—which changed global air travel forever in 2006—were based in the town, including a white friend of Evans, who was acquitted. The British press has taken to describing these relatively unusual converts as the white jihadis.
Samantha Lewthwaithe, a notorious al Shabaab fighter known as the White Widow, lived less than 15 miles away with her husband, one of the 7/7 bombers who killed 56 people in Britain’s most deadly Islamist terror attack. Another white convert to radical Islam, Jack Letts—dubbed “Jihadi Jack” in the British press, ran away to Syria from Oxford, which is just 25 miles to the west.
“There’s no doubt about it, there must be a network,” Thomas’s brother Micheal told The Daily Beast. “They are no different to gangs, and they’re not that smart. All the authorities have to do is connect the dots—and it just seems like they didn’t.”
Thomas Evans was prevented from boarding a flight to Kenya on a one-way ticket in 2011. When he got back home, he told his family that he had been questioned for five hours by men in plain clothes who seemed to know everything about him—his favorite fast-food restaurant, his friends, his mosque, the gym he attended, where he stayed when he took regular trips out of town, and the fact that he had just sold his car.
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“Looking back now, he must have been a person of interest from what they knew about him. It sounded like round-the-clock surveillance,” said Micheal.
And yet the authorities made no effort to contact the family.
Thomas and Micheal’s mother, Sally Evans, is adamant that she would have stopped her eldest son from joining the terrorists if she had been tipped off by the security services.
“Of course, I would! I’m his mother,” she told The Daily Beast. “I’d have taken his passport, gone to the police, anything—sat on him if necessary.”
Instead, unaware of how deeply he had been radicalized, she accepted his wishes when he said he was going to Egypt for a few months to take an Arabic course. Once he got to Cairo, however, Thomas Evans began an overland journey that eventually took him into Somalia, where he was to become a notorious al Shabaab fighter who beheaded Christians and took part in murderous cross-border raids. He was killed by a Kenyan sniper in 2015.
