Two teenage sisters who feared being victims of female genital mutilation and forced marriage were only rescued after they contacted the Foreign Office begging for help.
The teenagers were taken out Bethnal Green academy by their mother in July 2016 — 16 months after Shamima Begum and three classmates left the same school to join the Islamic State terror group in Syria.
The two sisters were repatriated almost a year later after texting the UK Government’s Forced Marriage Unit stating that their passports had been confiscated and they were being abused at their new boarding school in east Africa.
Six months after they first went missing the sisters managed to contact friends on social media, saying they were being held against their will and “enrolled at a school where they were being beaten”, according to an independent report into the case.
The government did not become aware of their plight until four months after the girls first raised the alarm.
The report found: “The two sisters were removed from school by their mother and taken to [the East African country]. There they were enrolled in a school where they were to be de-westernised.
