The mum of suspected UK ISIS fighter Jihadi Jack has said she's worried her 'over-liberal' parenting may have led to her son joining the terror group.
In May 2014, when he was just 18 years old, Jack Letts fled the UK, heading first to Kuwait and then to Syria later that year.
While he denied being part of the terrorist organisation, Letts, who grew up in Oxford, later admitted that he 'made a big mistake' and that he was an 'enemy of Britain'.
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In 2017, Letts was arrested and held in prison on Syria, where he waited for a decision to be made on his legal status.
And two years later, he was stripped of his British nationality, meaning he would not be allowed to return to the UK.
His mum, Sally Lane, has now revealed that she often blames herself for the way her son turned out and the decisions he made.
Writing in her new autobiography, she said that she looks back at his childhood and wonders if she could have done anything differently.
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"I wondered if they thought Jack’s problems stemmed from his over-liberal parents who hadn’t taken a firm enough hand with him," she recalled.
“Later on, a portion of the general public certainly believed this to be the case.
“I’ve wondered this myself during my constant internal discussions. Over and over again, I’ve raked over all the incidents of his childhood where I could have been better, or acted differently.”
Letts' dad, John, is an organic farmer from Canada, and with the majority of his relatives living thousands of miles away while growing up, Lane believes that her son, who converted to Islam when he was 16, may have left the UK in search for 'another, larger family in a Muslim network'.
"Was he given too much agency at an early age so that he grew up with the belief that he could, as an individual, change the world?" she asks.
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“Or perhaps he had been traumatised when, at the age of three, his father and I separated for a couple of years and he had spent formative years in a chaotic household that he, his younger brother and I shared with a group of lodgers, including an aggressive heroin addict whose friends regularly robbed the place?
“All these guilty thoughts and doubts I have lived with daily.”
In 2019, Letts' parents were convicted of funding terrorism after they were found to have been sending money to their son.
They received suspended sentences and Lane moved to Canada to the following year.
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A court in Canada recently ruled that Letts should be repatriated, though the Canadian government plans to appeal the decision.
He is currently being held in a Kurdish-run prison.
Featured Image Credit: Sky news/PA Images/AlamyTopics: UK News, Politics, World News