A “radicalised” chemistry teacher whose family hid his passport in an attempt to stop him joining Islamic State (Isis) has been jailed for six years.
Jamshed Javeed was poised to travel to Syria in late 2013 to fight alongside the group. After helping his younger brother make the trip, he prepared to follow from his Manchester home.
He admitted two terrorist offences at an earlier hearing but insisted that he was travelling only to support the people of Syria, not to join Isis.
Jailing Javeed, the judge, Michael Topolski, said he was “not satisfied” that he had rejected “Isis’s ultimate aims”.
Javeed’s relatives initially foiled his plans by hiding his passport but he persisted, even after learning that his wife was pregnant. The teacher, who taught in Bolton, Greater Manchester, was arrested in December 2013, hours before he was set to leave the UK.
He claimed that he wanted to support the ordinary people of Syria, was not an extremist and had never supported “the aims of Isis as now revealed and understood”.
