Britain’s most wanted female terrorist is believed to have been killed in a U.S. drone strike, according to local media.
Sally Jones, who recruited female jihadis to join the Islamic State, died in Syria in June, according to the Sun and other media. It is possible that her 12-year-old son Joe, or Jojo, was also killed in the strike, according to the reports.
The Sun reported that CIA officials told British intelligence that Jones was thought to have been killed by a U.S. Air Force Predator close to the border between Syria and Iraq.
Jones, 50, a former punk rock singer from the southern English county of Kent, traveled to Syria in 2013 to marry computer hacker Junaid Hussain. Hussain, 21, was a leading member of ISIS’s CyberCaliphate, the group responsible for hacking the U.S. military’s Twitter and YouTube accounts in 2015.
Hussain, from Birmingham in central England, was reportedly killed by a U.S. drone strike in August 2015, after which Jones was dubbed the “White Widow” by some media.
Jones was prominent on social media, recruiting a number of women to join ISIS under the pseudonym Umm Hussain al-Britani, with stories about how great life was with the militants. She also encouraged extremists to carry out attacks in the West.
U.S. intelligence chiefs said they cannot be 100% sure Jones was killed, but are “confident” she is dead, the Sun reported.
