One of Britain’s most respected ‘deradicalisers’ – who turned dozens of young women away from Islamist extremism – suddenly died of a blood aneurysm.
Friends of Hadiya Masieh were left shocked after the 48-year-old was taken to hospital with a headache, but died two days later after her life-support was switched off.
Although Ms Masieh stayed away from the media glare, she was deeply respected in Government and among terrorism experts for deradicalising women who were about to commit terrorist acts, or who were planning to flee to countries like Syria and join ISIS.
She has also turned a number of ‘jihadi brides’ from extremism after they returned from Syria.
A Prevent practitioner for decades, Ms Masieh’s most famous cases included five friends of Shamima Begum, the East London girl who fled to Syria and joined ISIS.
Begum, who fled with three fellow pupils from Bethnal Green Academy, is now languishing in a Syrian prison camp, where she is pleading to come back to the UK.
Her supporters have taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights after the Government stripped the 26-year-old of her British citizenship.
Begum has already lost her case at the UK’s Supreme Court.
Hadiya Masieh’s most famous cases included five friends of Shamima Begum, the East London girl who fled to Syria and joined ISIS
The five friends of Begum were her fellow classmates at Bethnal Green Academy who tried to follow her to Syria in 2015, but were stopped by police.
Friends of Ms Masieh said that all the girls were successfully turned away from extremism and are now leading normal lives.
The friend said: ‘Had Hadiya not helped them, these girls would have found a way to Syria, and may have been dead by now or in a detention camp like Shamima.’
Ms Masieh also provided intervention to female jihadis who returned from Syria and were ordered to undergo deradicalisation through the Prevent programme, or risk being jailed.
One such jihadi bride was Samia Hussein, 32, a British-Somali woman who fled to Syria to live under ISIS in 2015, but fled back to the UK in 2020.
The following year, the Mail on Sunday reported how Hussein had secretly sneaked back from Syria, living at her £500,000 council house in West London, and was even fitted with a prosthetic left arm on the NHS costing the taxpayer thousands of pounds.
Hussein had lost her limb during a bombing raid in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which was the de facto capital of ISIS that was liberated from the evil terror group by US-backed Kurdish forces in 2017.
Friends of Ms Masieh said that Hussein has also been successfully weaned off extremism and is now leading a normal life.
Samia Hussein was injured when coalition forces launched an attack on a weapons store next to her home in the Syrian city of Raqqa
Hussein (pictured) has also been successfully weaned off extremism and is now leading a normal life, according to friends of Ms Masieh
Although she became one of the country’s finest deradicalisers, Ms Masieh had her own backstory as an Islamic extremist for over ten years, but who turned her back on jihadism after the 7/7 attacks.
Born as a Hindu in a middle class Ugandan and Mauritian family in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, Ms Masieh was educated at a boarding school, and went to Brunel University in the late 1990s.
It was during her time at Brunel, she joined an Islamic extremist group called Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT), which wants to create a global caliphate for all the world’s Muslims.
At the time, HT was banned from universities, but operated inside campuses using front organisations.
The group was proscribed by the Government in January 2024, after it took part in a series of inflammatory protests against Israel, in the aftermath of the deadly terror attack on the country on October 7th 2023 that left 1200 dead.
Ms Masieh spent ten years as a leading officer inside HT’s female wing, but turned her back on the group after she witnessed the horrific 7/7 attacks on the London transport network in 2005, which left 52 commuters dead.
She later told the Observer newspaper: ‘The 7/7 bombers and the people I knew at HT were two sides of the same coin.
Hadiya Masieh spent ten years as a leading officer inside the female wing of Islamic extremist group called Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT)
Ms Masieh threw herself at anti-extremism work, becoming one of the founding members of the Quilliam Foundation
‘HT says it does not believe in violence, but the violence was never condemned; they just didn’t think it would achieve anything.’
Ms Masieh then threw herself at anti-extremism work, becoming one of the founding members of the Quilliam Foundation, a ground-breaking think-tank which worked with Government to counter Islamist ideology.
She recently founded an anti-extremism group called Groundswell, which tackles extremism at a community level.
Her colleague, Ghaffar Hussain, a former Prevent director, said: ‘She was one of the finest intervention providers in her profession. So many girls are now leading normal lives thanks to Hadiya. Her death has left a huge void in our lives.’