Officers from the U.K. North East Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) on Friday arrested Kimberley Miners, a 27-year former model who had once posed topless in a tabloid paper. She was released on bail after being held for twenty-four hours for possessing terrorist materials.
The Sunday Times reports that CTU officers also searched Miners’s home in Bradford.
CTU detectives last month warned Miners to stop contacting Islamist extremists online. The detectives approached her after they found her to have exchanged social media messages with an ISIS recruiter and distributed violent ISIS propaganda videos on social media. The Times notes that she has used multiple Facebook accounts under different names to engage with ISIS-affiliated extremists. She used one of her accounts to share a video of two armed young children training for jihad alongside an adult fighter from ISIS. Before she was arrested on Friday, she told the Times that the accounts were “fake profiles made against me.” “I myself am not active on any social media and do not have contact with anyone in association with terrorism,” she said.
All the Facebook accounts linked to Miners have been “friends” with a British citizen calling himself Abu Usamah al-Britani, a known ISISrecruiter operating out of Syria. Terrorism experts say his “specialty” is trying to persuade young Western women to come to Syria to marry jihadist fighters. The CTU said in a statement: “As part of an ongoing police investigation officers arrested a 27 year old woman from Bradford on Friday on suspicion of the possession of terrorist material. “The woman was arrested under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000; possessing a document or record which contains information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.
“She has been released on bail pending further enquiries.”
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