A Birmingham mum accused of taking her toddler son to Syria to join a terror group told a court she posed him in photos wearing Islamic State clothing because he “loved wearing hats”.
Tareena Shakil, who travelled to the self-declared caliphate in October 2014, accepted she had put a black balaclava bearing the IS logo on her boy. But the mum denied the move was aimed at supporting IS, pointing out that in another image her son was wearing a Thomas The Tank Engine hat.
The photograph, found on her phone, was taken in a mansion where she and her boy were living with other single women in the IS capital of Raqqa, she said.
Shakil, of Beechfield Road, Sparkbrook, and said a group of youngsters, including her toddler, had gone into a grown-ups’ room to get the hat and were taking turns wearing it.
The former college student today told a Birmingham Crown Court jury: “I said to a little boy, ‘can I just put it on (my son)’? He loved wearing hats.”
She added: “That’s why he’s laughing in this picture, because he likes wearing hats on his head. It’s nothing to do with what’s printed on it, even if it didn’t have that (IS) logo on it, I would still have taken this picture.”
The 26-year-old denies a charge of joining proscribed terrorist group IS, and another allegation of encouraging acts of terrorism through Twitter. Shakil also said a picture of a woman holding a pistol on her phone was actually of her IS minder, who watched her all the time she lived at the former city governor’s mansion - known as the Maqqar. She added that a comment home to relatives saying “I have a gun” was only sent because she was told what to say by the minder.
The former health worker flew from East Midlands Airport to Turkey on October 20 2014, telling friends she was going on a family beach holiday.
But she ended up living in the IS capital of Raqqa, after being driven across the border and Syrian countryside in secret.
She returned home with her toddler in February 2015, when she was arrested off a flight landing at Heathrow airport.
Last Thursday, Shakil said she had gone to Syria to live under sharia law but denied she was a terrorist.
