Former UK citizen Mahdi Hashi jailed for 9 years for supporting al Shabaab

Former British citizen Mahdi Hashi has been sentenced to nine years in prison in the US for supporting the Somali al Shabaab organisation, three years after being secretly taken to the US from a Djibouti jail.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that Hashi, 26, who was stripped of his British citizenship in 2012 by Theresa May, has spent the past three years in solitary confinement in a New York prison. He pleaded guilty in May last year to conspiring to provide material support to al Shabaab (an al Qaeda affiliate) in Somalia several years earlier.

During sentencing U.S. District Judge John Gleeson said the facts were “complicated”, accepting in part Hashi’s position that he joined al Shabaab not to engage in violent attacks but because he thought it could restore peace to war-torn Somalia, according to Reuters.

“I believe you believe this organisation you joined was dramatically different than what you thought or hoped it would be,” he said.

Somali-born Hashi arrived in the UK with his family as a five-year-old in 1994 after they fled the civil war in their native Somalia and claimed asylum. At the age of 14, he became a British citizen.

Hashi claimed he was “harassed” by British intelligence agencies and he and several others went public, telling the Independent in 2009 they were being pressured into spying for MI5. Shortly after this he travelled to Somalia to care for an unwell grandmother, according to his own account.

By June 2012 Hashi was still living in Somalia, now married and with a son, when his parents called to tell him a letter had arrived containing a deprivation order from the home secretary. The letter stated his British citizenship was being removed on grounds he was “involved in Islamist extremism”.

Hashi claimed he then left Somalia as there was no British embassy there from which he could launch an appeal, which under the law he had to do within 28 days. That summer he travelled to Djibouti, where he was detained by the authorities.

More...