Islamic State devotee who helped wannabe terrorist could be free in months

A radicalised young Melbourne woman who helped a wannabe terrorist in his plan to fight for Islamic State could be free from prison within three months despite not having renounced her past devotion to an extreme ideology.

Hadashah Sa’adat Khan was on Friday jailed for 2½ years for online communications she had with an American man in June 2016, when she advised him how to travel to Syria to fight for the terrorist organisation, and passed on the details of intermediaries.

But with over two years already served, Khan is already eligible for parole and was told by her lawyer she would likely be released from prison in late August.

Her time in prison included her writing letters declaring her love for Momena Shoma, another woman jailed for terror offences.

Khan was a teenager when between 2014 and 2016 she became radicalised online through watching a series of violent Islamic State videos and propaganda at her family’s Dandenong North home.

When aged 18 she used messaging apps with the American across five days in June 2016 to pass on assistance to help him get to the Middle East.

But his arrest by the FBI alerted Australian authorities to Khan’s involvement, and she was arrested and interviewed in 2018 and then released, and arrested again in 2020.

At 24, she has spent more than 830 days in custody.

Khan pleaded guilty to providing support or resources to a terror organisation – an offence which carries a maximum penalty of 25 years – and failing to provide a passcode for her mobile phone.

“It is always very serious whenever anybody dabbles in terrorist activity,” County Court judge Richard Maidment told her. “Your offending may have been at the lower end of the scale, but it is to be denounced.”

Maidment said he found no evidence Khan was remorseful for her crimes or that she had renounced her past pledge to Islamic State.

A formal assessment found she was a low to moderate risk of reoffending, and that without support such as a de-radicalisation program she could revert to extreme ideology.

The judge said he hoped Khan would “embrace” the chance to rehabilitate and asked if she planned to return to live with her family and accept help.

“Of course, yes,” she replied.

During her time in prison, Khan wrote letters to Shoma, who is serving a 48-year jail term for two attacks in the name of Islamic State: one for stabbing her homestay host Roger Singaravelu in the neck in his Mill Park home in 2019, and the other an attempt to do the same with garden shears on a fellow inmate in 2020.

Past court hearings were told Khan had professed her love for Shoma and discussed martyrdom and dying for Allah, and that the two women were seen together in CCTV recorded in the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre.

Khan wrote letters to Shoma between May and November 2020 and one of them read in part: “I love you to infinity and beyond. I think about you all the time.”

There was no evidence Khan was involved in Shoma’s attack on the other inmate, in which the woman fended off an attempted stabbing to the neck.

Khan was born in Afghanistan but witnessed violence in Pakistan as a young girl and migrated to Australia with her family when aged 9. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

She was bullied at school in Melbourne and left in year 10 and returned to Afghanistan as a teenager with her mother and sisters, Maidment said. On returning to Melbourne, she was “disenfranchised” and socially isolated and became radicalised by what she watched online, in what the judge called “an all-too-common story” that coincided with Islamic State’s rise in prominence.

Later, while in prison, Khan told a psychologist the people she met online “were nice to me, they gave me advice and they said they loved me”.

Maidment accepted Khan’s offending fell at the lower end of the range of terror-related offences and that the assistance she provided the American man was likely common knowledge, as he was already radicalised and had previously tried to travel to the Middle East.

Source: The Age