Alleged ‘Jihad Bride’ Mother-of-Nine Back in UK Living on Welfare, Says ISIS Suspects ‘Oppressed’

Jihadi
MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images
Virginia Hale

A British-German dual national accused of becoming a ‘jihadi bride’ in Syria is back living in Britain and living on benefits, claiming that ISIS suspects are “the oppressed people”.

Two years ago it was alleged that Natalie Bracht travelled to Syria to become the second wife of a 31-year-old Islamic State jihadist who had been based in London, Celso Rodrigues Da Costa.

However, Bracht, a Muslim convert and mother of nine who is now 45, denies having ever gone to the war-torn Middle Eastern nation.

At the weekend it was revealed in the Sunday People that she is now living on a canal boat at taxpayers’ expense and hopes to earn money as a busker.

Bracht was flown in April from Germany to Britain, where she was reportedly “interrogated” for a number of hours under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 by Special Branch agents — who she said questioned her over “what I thought about Brexit, how I think about elections, what I think about vaccines”.

“They asked me where I had stayed in Syria. I had to tell them a couple of times, ‘Guys, I wasn’t in Syria’,” she claimed, complaining that she has “been treated like a terror suspect” despite never having been convicted of terror-related crimes.

Very few people who return from the former caliphate are ever charged for anything, however, given the obvious difficulty of gathering the evidence for a prosecution from the war-torn region.

Bracht, who police say suffers from a personality disorder, admitted that she began volunteering in 2012 as an interpreter for the campaign group CAGE, which has previously demanded Britain abolish all terror laws.

In 2017, their director — who once described the infamous Islamic State executioner ‘Jihadi John’ as  an“extremely kind, gentle, beautiful young man” — was convicted under anti-terror legislation.

More recently, Breitbart London reported how CAGE had advertisements pulled from Facebook in May after they alleged that the novel coronavirus was an act of revenge from Allah.

The London-based “human rights” group also used the advert to lash out at “racist” right-leaning newspapers which have criticised them, proclaiming that such media outlets “stoke fear and hatred of Muslims”.

Bracht translated letters for terror suspects detained worldwide out of concern over rising “Islamophobia”, and was given access to documents pertaining to the infamous al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki.

“It’s a modern witch hunt. These are the oppressed people,” Bracht told the Sunday People, referring to jihadist suspects in the Middle East.

“They are in prison, then they are free again and then they are not ­convicted but treated for the rest of their lives as full-time terror suspects. They never had ­convictions,” she said, adding that she felt sorry for Shamima Begum, a London-born woman who travelled to Syria to become a jihadi bride in her teens and now wants to return to Britain.

The British government stripped the ISIS defector of her British citizenship after it was said that Begum “carr[ied] a Kalashnikov rifle and earned a reputation as a strict ‘enforcer’ of [the Islamic State’s] laws, such as dress codes for women”, as well as having “literally stitch[ed] the vests” of suicide bombers.

But Bracht claimed the jihadi bride had been “brainwashed on the ­internet”, adding that “she was only 15 years old” when she left Britain for Syria and so “should be dealt with by child protection” rather than by law enforcement.

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