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LONDON: The UK must consider repatriating British members of Daesh held in Syrian detention camps, the government’s independent terrorism adviser has said.

“Repatriation would not be moral absolution. If someone came back it wouldn’t prevent them from potentially being prosecuted for what they’ve done,” Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, told the BBC.

The incoming Trump administration’s counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka has also urged the UK to follow the US lead and take back its citizens who joined Daesh.

“Any nation which wishes to be seen to be a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment,” Gorka said.

“That is doubly so for the UK which has a very special place in President (Donald) Trump’s heart, and we would all wish to see the ‘special relationship’ fully re-established.”

One high-profile Briton who traveled to Syria to support Daesh is Shamima Begum, who left London as a teenager in 2015.

Her citizenship was stripped in 2019. Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said Begum “will not be coming back to the UK.”

Hall said: “It could be quite a pragmatic decision in the overall interests of national security to bring someone back.

“There is obviously some national security benefit of leaving people there because you don’t have to monitor them.

“On the other hand, there haven’t yet been any attacks in Europe by anyone who has been repatriated in this way and if they are left there ... and then they escape, they would be much more dangerous, actually, to the UK.”

The US and some European countries have repatriated their citizens from Syrian camps. Many have been put on trial and imprisoned.

Lammy said Begum’s case has been reviewed in court and the 25-year-old is “not a UK national.”

Many of the detainees are “dangerous, are radicals,” he told the “Good Morning Britain” show on Thursday.

Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch has also said Begum should not be allowed to return to the UK.

“Citizenship means committing to a country and wanting its success. It’s not an international travel document for crime tourism,” Badenoch said.

BEIJING: The fifth anniversary of the first known death from Covid-19 passed seemingly unnoticed in China Saturday, with no official remembrances in a country where the pandemic is a taboo subject.
On January 11, 2020, health officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan announced that a 61-year-old man had died from complications of pneumonia caused by a previously unknown virus.
The disclosure came after authorities had reported dozens of infections over several weeks by the pathogen later named SARS-CoV-2 and understood as the cause of Covid-19.
It went on to spark a global pandemic that has so far killed over seven million people and profoundly altered ways of life around the world, including in China.
On Saturday, however, there appeared to be no official memorials in Beijing’s tightly controlled official media.
The ruling Communist Party kept a tight leash on public discussion throughout its zero-Covid policy, and has eschewed reflections on the hard-line curbs since dramatically ditching them at the end of 2022.
On social media, too, many users seemed unaware of the anniversary.
A few videos circulating on Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — noted the date but repeated the official version of events.

FIRST COVID CASE
And on the popular Weibo platform, users who gravitated to the former account of Li Wenliang — the whistleblower doctor who was investigated by police for spreading early information about the virus — did not directly reference the anniversary.
“Dr. Li, another year has gone by,” read one comment on Saturday. “How quickly time passes.”
There was also little online commemoration in Hong Kong, where Beijing largely snuffed out opposition voices when it imposed a sweeping national security law on the semi-autonomous city in 2020.
Unlike other countries, China has not built major memorials to those who lost their lives during the pandemic.
Little is known about the identity of the first Covid casualty except that he was a frequent visitor to a Wuhan seafood market where the virus is thought to have circulated during the initial outbreak.
Within days of his death, other countries reported their first cases of the disease, showing that official efforts to contain its spread had failed.
China was later criticized by Western governments for allegedly covering up the early transmission of the virus and effacing evidence of its origins, though Beijing has vehemently maintained it acted decisively and with full transparency.
According to the WHO, China has officially reported nearly 100 million Covid cases and 122,000 deaths to date, although the true number will likely never be known.
In 2023, Beijing declared a “decisive victory” over Covid, calling its response a “miracle in human history.”