An Islamic State fighter who devised the “bank of jihad” fraud in the UK before fleeing to Syria was spared deportation to safeguard his rehabilitation.
Daha Essa, 27, was set to be removed from the UK on leaving prison for robbing train passengers with a six-inch hunting knife, but was allowed to stay after a judge ruled that sending him back to the Netherlands would contravene an EU human rights ruling on rehabilitation.
Essa, a Somali by birth who has Dutch citizenship, remained in the UK and set up a fraud nicknamed “the bank of jihad” — a network of con artists targeting pensioners as old as 94 for their savings — in a scam that would lead to money being paid into his account after he left to wage jihad with Isis.
He was the last of 11 men jailed this week who posed as police officers to target their victims, who included widowers and a war hero, for up to £135,000.
After serving half his five-year prison term, Essa fooled two senior judges at an immigration tribunal into believing that he intended to reform and make amends to his family for the shame that he had caused them.
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Essa was living in Whitechapel, east London, at the time, where he registered a company called Sweetz n Treatz at an address used by the brother of a well-known Islamist firebrand who cannot be named for legal reasons.
Whitechapel was also the location identified by detectives as the main centre for the men behind the Isis fraud, many of whom were never identified.
Essa moved to the Netherlands with his mother as a baby. Two of his older siblings moved to Britain and his mother followed in 2000. Essa, then aged about 12, and two more of his siblings, joined her in 2001, leaving his father behind in the Netherlands.
He was arrested for robbing a passenger on a train in 2007. Essa pleaded not guilty and was said to have shown “no remorse or awareness of the terrifying nature of his conduct on his victim”. The judge at Snaresbrook crown court concluded it was an offence at the “high end” of the range of knife-point robbery and sentenced him to five years in a young offender institution.
After submissions from a psychologist, judges blocked his deportation, citing an EU directive. The judgment found that “his prospects of developing his rehabilitation are significantly improved by continued residence here”.
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In fact Essa was involved in an “industrial”-scale fraud at that time, stealing more than £1 million from elderly victims and using it to fund Isis. His fingerprints were found on a money band and bank slips after cash was paid into the account of Ahmed Ali, a fellow jihadist who had travelled to Syria in April 2014.
A few months later, at the end of 2014, Essa also left the country for Syria, leaving others to continue the scam.