What was claimed
Shamima Begum has secretly returned to the UK.
Our verdict
This is not true—we know Ms Begum was in Syria on 14 February 2020. She is banned from returning to the UK, and there is no evidence to suggest she has.
Shamima Begum has not secretly returned to Britain
27 February 2020
Claims that Shamima Begum has returned to the UK, which we have written about before, are being shared again on Facebook.
Ms Begum left London for Syria in 2015, when she was a teenager. The UK government revoked her British citizenship in February 2019, and has refused to let her come back.
Nevertheless, posts appeared on Facebook, Twitter and the EuroWeekly website in September claiming, without evidence, that “Shamima Begum is flying into the UK today”.
“Secretly being flown in,” the post continues. “No press coverage allowed for her safety. Being represented by Cherie Blair.” None of this was true, as we said at the time.
Ms Begum lost her appeal against the UK government’s decision in February 2020, but a screenshot of one of the original posts about her supposed secret return continues to be shared on Facebook. It offers no evidence for the claim.
As it happens, we know that Ms Begum was still in Syria beyond September 2019, because the ABC News correspondent James Longman recently interviewed her there. We contacted Mr Longman, who told us that the interview took place on 14 February 2020, in the al-Roj camp in the northeast of the country.
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 there is no evidence to show that Ms Begum has returned, and many reasons to believe that she hasn’t.