What was claimed
Shamima Begum has been flown back or is due to be flown back to the UK.
Our verdict
There is no evidence for this and it’s circling online with known false claims.
There’s no evidence Shamima Begum has been flown back to the UK
19 September 2019
Claims that Shamima Begum, the teenager who left the UK for Syria in 2015, has been flown back to the UK and that Cherie Blair is now her lawyer, have been shared around 50,000 times on Facebook and also on Twitter. Another version also claims that she’s already back in the UK and “will now be given a new identity”.
“You heard it here first. With everyone distracted by Boris it is a good day to bury bad news. Shamima Begum is flying into the UK today. That girl who left to join isis. Secretly being flown in. No press coverage allowed for her safety. Being represented by Cherie Blair. a joke.”
Twitter account, 13 September 2019
““ISIS Bride” Shamima Begum flown to UK amid press secrecy”
EuroWeekly website, 13 September 2019
There is no evidence for this story and no evidence to suggest it’s anything but made up. The only source is some tweets from early September that give no evidence.
Cherie Blair’s office confirmed to us that neither she nor her law firm represent or have ever represented Shamima Begum.
The solicitor who represented Ms Begum’s family, Tasnime Akunjee, told Full Fact that he was working under the understanding that she was still in the al-Roj camp in Syria.
He said that neither her family nor her lawyer, Gareth Peirce, were “aware of her return or imminent return”.
Gareth Peirce’s law firm did not respond to Full Fact’s request for comment.
We also asked the Home Office for comment, which it would not do on the record.
The legal grounds for her ability to return are unclear. Then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid revoked her British citizenship in February. The family’s lawyer, Mr Akunjee, said at the time that she didn’t have Bangladeshi citizenship. The Home Office said Mr Javid had “the power to deprive someone of their British citizenship where it would not render them stateless.”
In early September, the Metropolitan Police lost their bid in court to view journalists’ notes and material they did not broadcast from interviews with Shamima Begum earlier this year in Syria.
The post also claims that the press are banned from reporting on her claimed return. We are aware of no such ban. The post doesn’t mention any particular type of ban, but we’ve written more about so-called reporting bans or D-notices here.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as mixture as the main claim is unevidenced and the part about Cherie Blair is false.