What was claimed
Shamima Begum is back in the UK.
Our verdict
As of May 2020, this is not the case.
No, Shamima Begum is not back in the UK
19 May 2020
A Facebook post of a screenshot claims that Shamima Begum, the teenager who left the UK for Syria in 2015, is “flying into the UK today”.
This is not true.
The screenshot is of a now-deleted Facebook post that we first wrote about in September 2019. The post wasn’t true then, it wasn’t true when we checked it again earlier this year, and there’s no reason to believe it’s become true since.
We know for a fact that Ms Begum was in Syria in February 2020, as journalist James Longman interviewed her there on 14 February 2020.
We’ve seen no evidence that would suggest she has returned. The UK government revoked her British citizenship in February 2019, and has refused to let her come back. She lost the first stage of her appeal on this decision in February 2020.
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 false because Shamima Begum has not returned to the UK.