The mother of an Oxford youngster who became a suspected fighter known as 'Jihadi Jack' has said she believes his 'over-liberal' upbringing may have been the reason he joined Isis.
Sally Lane, a former Oxfam fundraising officer, has published a new autobiography Reasonable Cause to Suspect.
In it she says she has “guilty thoughts” every day about whether his “chaotic” childhood in Oxford led to him leaving home at 18 to live in Syria where he married into a top Isis family.
One of her regrets was living with “a group of lodgers, including an aggressive heroin addict whose friends regularly robbed the place” during Letts’s “formative” years.
She describes a meeting with tutors at a further education college in Oxford.
She writes: “I wondered if they thought Jack’s problems stemmed from his over-liberal parents who hadn’t taken a firm enough hand with him.
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“Later on, a portion of the general public certainly believed this to be the case.
“I’ve wondered this myself during my constant internal discussions. Over and over again, I’ve raked over all the incidents of his childhood where I could have been better, or acted differently.”
Letts, a Cherwell School student, converted to Islam at 16 and travelled to the Middle East in 2014.
Ms Lane wonders if this was to find “another, larger family in a Muslim network” as his father is Canadian and his own relatives were mainly living thousands of miles away in North America.
She also says she did not take her son’s obsessive compulsive disorder “seriously enough”.
She continues: “Was he given too much agency at an early age so that he grew up with the belief that he could, as an individual, change the world?
“All these guilty thoughts and doubts I have lived with daily.”
Ms Lane and Jack's father, organic farmer John Letts, received suspended sentences after being found guilty of funding terrorism in 2019.
They ignored repeated warnings Jack had joined Islamic State in Syria and sent - or tried to send - a total of £1,723 to their son despite being told by police three times not to.
Lane told jurors at the Old Bailey she was "horrified" when Jack rang her to say he was in Syria in September 2014.
She said: "I screamed at him, 'How could you be so stupid? You will get killed. You will be beheaded'."
John Letts begged his son to come home, telling him: "A father should never live to see his son buried."
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Jack, now 28, was captured by pro-Western forces in Syria and stripped of his British citizenship on national security grounds.
He has been held in an overcrowded Syrian prison camp since 2017.
But last month a court in Ottawa ruled that he must be repatriated to Canada because he has dual citizenship through his father.
The Canadian government says it will appeal the decision.
Ms Lane left the UK in 2020 to start a new life in Canada. She now lives in Ottawa.
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This story was written by Miranda Norris, she joined the team in 2021 and covers news across Oxfordshire as well as news from Witney.
Get in touch with her by emailing: Miranda.Norris@newsquest.co.uk. Or find her on Twitter: @Mirandajnorris
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