London teenagers ‘wanted to go to Syria to help’

The parents of the schoolboys raised the alarm with an early-morning call to Brent Council leader Mohammed Butt, who rushed to their home.

Councillor Butt said the parents were scared that their children had gone. “I could see the panic in their faces,” he told Channel 4 News.

He said alarm bells started to ring when they learned that the teenagers’ passports had disappeared. At that point he told them they needed to contact the police and get them involved.

‘Not radicalised’

That tip-off enabled the Met to contact the Turkish authorities, and by midnight on Saturday the two 17-year-olds were back in London in police custody. They were later released on bail to their families.

“Personally, I don’t think they’d been radicalised,” Councillor Butt told Simon Israel. “They’d been caught up in emotions, as such.”

“I met with the two families, and you could not meet a more normal family than those two families.

“It just beggars belief that these guys got caught up in their own thinking of trying to go out there – to do some good.”

‘Quite naive’

Councillor Butt says he has spoken to the boys since their return. “All they’ve said from the conversation I’ve had with them, is that they wanted to go out there and help. But trying to help for me and you is a different thing because we understand the implications of going out to Syria.”

He continued: “But [they are] two 17-year-olds who are quite naïve, who are still quite naïve, actually, because one of them was saying to me: ‘When can I go back to school?'”

On the subject of the government’s Prevent programme, which aims to stop people becoming radicalised and supporting terrorism, Councillor Butt told Channel 4 News: “Getting it to work in the communities, trying to build a trust and a relationship within those communities, it’s not working because there is still an element of mistrust, distrust.”