To say that Sally Lane and her husband John Letts have been on a ‘journey’ is something of an understatement.
Turn the clock back to 2014, and they were living a comfortable, middle-class life in an Oxford suburb. The household was loving, liberal and slightly chaotic – ‘nice, if alternative’, according to neighbours.
Mrs Lane helped her husband run his organic farming business while sons Jack and Tyler were encouraged by their ‘armchair revolutionary’ parents to question the ways of the world. The couple would proudly recall how, aged seven, Jack had joined marchers in London to oppose Tony Blair‘s war in Iraq.
John Letts and Sally Lane, the parents of a Muslim convert dubbed Jihadi Jack, leave the Old Bailey in London where they were spared jail by being sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, suspended for 12 months, after being convicted of funding terrorism by sending their son money in Syria
Of course, like any parents, they just wanted the best for their children.
But five years ago Jack left England for the Middle East, ending up in Raqqa, the Syrian capital of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate.
Precisely what role he fulfilled while living under this barbaric regime remains unclear, but the hate-filled tone of his Facebook posts and messages to his family speak for themselves.
Back in England, the family home was raided by police and his parents put under surveillance by the security services. Ultimately, they would be charged with three counts of funding terrorism after they sent money to him in Syria. At one point they were behind bars as they were briefly denied bail. Mrs Lane, 57, was held at HMP Bronzefield, the women’s prison once home to Rose West.
Yesterday an Old Bailey jury found them guilty of one count of funding terrorism and they received a suspended sentence. Their son, meanwhile, remains in a Syrian jail, where he has been held by Kurdish forces for two years. His parents are demanding he be allowed home.
As with the case of Shamima Begum, the teenage Londoner who joined IS in 2015 and is now languishing in a Syrian refugee camp, the public’s sympathies will be very much divided. Not just over Jack’s fate, but his parents’ as well.
As a boy with his dad: John Letts (left) and Jack Letts
Should their love for their child have allowed them to take the law into their own hands? Were their actions so wilfully blind to what was really going on as to render their behaviour inexcusable?
As prosecutors pointed out, any funds sent to Jack could ultimately have benefited the terror group, either directly or by supporting the caliphate’s economy more generally. But throughout, Letts and Lane maintained that they knew best. Again and again they ignored advice from friends, from experts and from the police.
They attacked the Press for branding their son Jihadi Jack, the Government for failing to negotiate his return and British society generally for being Islamaphobic.
‘Perhaps if the police and MI5 hadn’t wasted so much time and money prosecuting parents trying to rescue [their] son they could have concentrated on real terrorists,’ Lane once observed on Twitter.
Perhaps if the parents had heeded the warning signs, the authorities wouldn’t have needed to waste that money in the first place. John Letts, 58, was born on a small farm in Ontario, Canada, and studied environmental science and botany at university. An idealist who dreamed of helping to ‘feed the world’, he moved to the UK in 1990 and took a masters degree in archaeobotany, becoming fascinated by long-forgotten grain crops.
By analysing straw from old thatched roofs, he identified types of wheat grown in Britain centuries ago, and began cultivating them to make ‘heirloom’ flour, which he now sells to organic bakeries and upmarket chefs.
His business got a £25,000 grant from the Prince’s Countryside Fund – set up by Prince Charles to promote sustainable farming – and also featured on the BBC’s Countryfile.
He met his British-born wife Sally in Canada, where she moved as a teenager and studied French and history at university. In Oxford, she worked as a freelance books editor and for Oxfam. Eldest son Jack initially did well at school and after attending a church primary he moved to a comprehensive. Friends remember him as a cheerful, football-loving pupil.
Sally Lane, 56, and John Letts, 58, who have been found guilty of funding terrorism at the Old Bailey where they were sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, suspended for 12 months
But while completing his GCSEs, he started to display repetitive behaviours. He was diagnosed with Tourette’s and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
A year later, he flunked his AS-levels, and enrolled at a local college to re-sit – but dropped out.
By then he was showing an interest in Islam, which his parents encouraged, in part because they believed it gave him an outlet for his OCD. His father would drive him to the mosque, cook him halal meat and purchase the ankle-length robes he started to wear.
Jack learned Arabic and, aided by his photographic memory, was fluent within six months.
Fired up by the Arab Spring, he grew increasingly angry at the failure of the West to intervene against Bashar Assad in Syria. Friends grew concerned that he had been radicalised – and raised it directly with hisparents. The court heard how Anwar Belhimer warned them Jack was being taught Arabic by a Somalian man known as ‘Abdullah’ with a bad reputation in the area.
However, his parents paid for a £407 return ticket to Jordan so Jack could visit an Oxford friend. ‘We gave him a hug and waved him off, saying ‘see you in ten days’,’ said Lane. The date was May 26, 2014. His parents have not seen Jack face-to-face since.
On September 2 2014, phone records showed a flurry of calls. Lane told the court of one call: ‘He said, ‘Mum, I’m in Syria’. I screamed at him, ‘How could you be so stupid? You will get beheaded’.’
Over the next weeks and months his parents tried to piece together what he was doing. ‘Clearly I indulged you, I made you think you were centre of the universe,’ Lane wrote to her son after his arrival in Syria.’ In an email to a friend in 2014, his father wrote: ‘It’s like your child is walking in the middle of the 401 [a Canadian motorway] with his mp3 player playing loudly and he does not realise a transport truck is bearing down on him at full speed. And there is not a f*****g thing you can do about it. I know he is not a nasty boy but he’s very stupid and I created him with my armchair revolutionary s***e.’
Sally Lane, 57, (pictured) refused to believe their 18-year-old son Jack (pictured) had become a dangerous extremist when they allowed him to travel, the Old Bailey heard
Soon after, the couple learned that he had married an Iraqi woman called Asmaa. The pair are believed to have had a son together. By early 2015 British police were investigating Jack’s activities The couple were warned they risked prosecution if they sent any more money.
The tone of Jack’s Facebook posts changed. In July, Linus Doubtfire, a former school friend of Letts, posted a picture of a group of soldiers celebrating completing a commando artillery course for the British Army.
Jack saw the image and posted: ‘I would love to perform a martyrdom operation in this scene’.
Determined to enlist outside help, the couple sought advice from Shiraz Maher, an expert at the Islamic Centre for the study of Radicalisation at Kings College, London. Dr Maher told the Old Bailey: ‘I advised them very clearly not to send money.
‘I said they would fall foul of terrorist legislation.’ The following month, Jack requested they send cash to a friend’s family who were in financial need. His parents duly wired £233 to an unknown woman by the name of Rached Khan. It is this payment for which they would ultimately be convicted.
Lane told police her son was ‘more on the religious side than fighting’. But they told her: ‘Jack is with IS, we believe he’s with IS. Sending money to Jack is the same as sending money to IS in the eyes of the law.’ She responded: ‘Yeah, well, okay.’
By December, messages from Jack seemed to suggest that he might be seeking to leave Raqqa. He told his mother: ‘I came with the intention of defending the Muslims that are being oppressed … but I found that there is a big misguidance in the state that I have nothing to do with.’ He requested money ‘for travel’ and ‘smugglers’, prompting Letts to contact police to say their son was ‘desperate to get out’ and in imminent danger. To their surprise, a junior officer told the couple that in these circumstances they could send their son money.
But jurors heard that the parents were swiftly warned they had been incorrectly advised. Undeterred, the couple tried to wire £1,000 to Jack on New Year’s Eve but the transaction was blocked.
Then on January 4 2016 they tried to transfer £500 using a fake name and a false address. The following day officers searched their home, discovering a mobile phone in a glasses case.
‘I don’t know what that is doing there,’ Letts told police.
Investigations revealed the phone corresponded to one whose number had been given to financial services firm Western Union along with the false name and address. Charged with three counts of funding terrorism, the couple eventually ended up in the dock at The Old Bailey.
The trial was delayed as the defendants challenged terrorism law.
In their defence they claimed they had acted to save their son, who was in imminent danger; they were the victims of a ‘cruel’ and ‘inhumane’ prosecution.
Meanwhile, their son’s future remains uncertain. He has been in prison in Syria since June 2017 when he was detained by the Kurdish YPG, and has since given a number of interviews.
When asked recently about what he missed about the UK, he replied ‘pasties and Doctor Who’ before adding: ‘I miss people mostly. I miss my mum.’
Jihadi Jack’s family hit out at police as they’re spared jail for sending cash to son in Syria
The parents of the Muslim convert dubbed Jihadi Jack were spared jail last night despite being convicted of funding terrorism.
John Letts and Sally Lane knew their son had openly boasted about wanting to blow up and behead British soldiers after he fled to Syria.
But they insisted that by wiring him cash from Britain they were ‘doing what any parent would do’ to safeguard their child. Outside court, their lawyer read a statement from the couple saying they had been let down by the police and the Government. ‘We have been convicted for doing what any parent would do if they thought that their child’s life was in danger,’ they said.
Last night, new footage also emerged in which Jack Letts, now 23, revealed he left his home in Oxford aged 18 in 2014 to join Islamic State because he was ‘an enemy of Britain’. In a BBC interview conducted while he was being held by Kurdish forces in northern Syria, he said he was ready to carry out a suicide attack.
But he said he now regrets abandoning his A Levels in Oxford and joining the barbaric terror group. ‘I know I was definitely an enemy of Britain, he said. ‘I did what I did. I made a big mistake, and that’s what happened.’
An Old Bailey jury convicted his parents of a single count of funding terrorism by sending their son £223 in 2015. They were cleared of wiring him a further £1,000 and could not reach a verdict on a third charge related to an attempt to send £500.
The couple were handed a 15-month prison term suspended for 12 months and told to pay £140. The sentence brought to an end a three-year legal saga believed to have cost taxpayers more than £500,000. In their statement, the couple added: ‘No one during our trial even suggested that the £223 that we actually managed to send to Jack was in fact used for terrorism. The fact that the jury acquitted us of some of the allegations makes it clear that the jury accepted that we believed that our son’s life was in imminent danger.
‘We believe we have been let down badly by the police and the Government.’
Mr Letts, 58, and his 57-year-old wife were accused of sending their son cash while he was living in the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa.
Most of the money was blocked – but £233 made its way abroad after police warned the pair there was enough evidence for them to be prosecuted. Their son is still being held by Kurdish forces and has been in custody for two years.
At one stage the radicalised teen had said he wanted to kill former schoolfriend Linus Doubtfire – who had passed an Army course and later posted a photograph of his squad on Facebook. Underneath the picture, Jack wrote: ‘I would love to perform a martyrdom operation in this scene.’
He later told his mother: ‘I would happily kill each and every one of Linus’s unit personally….I honestly want to cut Linus’s head off.’
Letts, an organic wheat farmer, and his wife Sally – a former Oxfam fundraiser – hold joint British and Canadian citizenship along with their son.
They denied knowing the money could be used for terrorism and insisted they believed police had given them permission to send the cash.
But a jury of six men and six women decided the parents ought to have realised the money they sent could have been used for terrorism.
Judge Nicholas Hilliard said: ‘You both lost sight of the realities. But you have had the strain of this case for four years, which is a long time.’
Speaking after the hearing, Jenny Hopkins, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: ‘It is natural for parents to care for their son but Sally Lane and John Letts were warned of Jack’s activities and told not to send him money or risk prosecution.
‘They chose to ignore that advice. This case shows that people are breaking the law if they give money that could be used for terrorist purposes even if they don’t sympathise with terrorism. The lessons are simple: individuals should not travel to fight in war zones and those at home should not send them money.’
