Agencies missed radicalisation of Abdullah and Jaffar Deghayes

Opportunities were missed to prevent the radicalisation of two boys who went to Syria to fight with jihadists and died, a report says.

The serious case review found child protection agencies failed to recognise that Abdullah, 18, and 17-year-old Jaffar Deghayes were at risk.

The pair were believed to have been with the al Qaeda-affiliated al Nusra Front when they were killed.

The review added there was little understanding among professionals of the part religion played in their lives in the Brighton area, where they lived before they left for the Middle East.

A third brother Amer Deghayes, a former finance student, also travelled to Syria in an attempt to overthrow the government of Bashar Assad.

He told ITV News in 2014, the same year in which Abdullah and Jaffar died, that he had promised Allah he would take part in jihad "until I get killed".

In 2013, a school raised concerns that some young people were converting to Islam and had been paid by a relative of the boys’ brother to attend a gym behind a place of worship.

Later that year, Jaffar was referred to a child protection panel after making an "emotional" comment about Americans.

The panel said it believed Jaffar was "not at risk of being drawn into terror related activities".

The report said: "Both these instances were missed opportunities to learn more about the activities of the young people and to understand the links between young people in Brighton."

The report said it appeared as though the family were targeted directly in Brighton.

The brothers were the nephews of Omar Deghayes, who was held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay between 2002 and 2007 after he was arrested in Pakistan.

The review also looked into evidence the two brothers and three other siblings suffered physical abuse at the hands of their father.

It found they were made to get up at 4.30am to study the Koran and beaten if their father felt they were not studying properly.

Electrical wire was sometimes used to whip them.

The Deghayes brothers were made subjects of child protection plans in 2010 but the professionals found working with the family difficult after reports of racist and religiously-motivated incidents led to no one being prosecuted.

The professionals told the report’s author of their "helplessness" in the face of having to assist the family, and some said they felt they had "no tools in the toolbox".

The news that Jaffar and Abdullah had gone to Syria came as a "total surprise and shock" to professionals, the report added.

Some felt they could have intervened to stop the boys travelling if they had known they were being radicalised and intent on heading to Syria.

Some of the blame lay with a lack of sharing of information between counter-terrorism police officers and other agencies, it said.

After the boys had left, Brighton and Hove’s Local Safeguarding Children Board, identified 26 others who might be at risk of travelling to the Middle East.

Graham Bartlett, independent chairman of the Brighton and Hove Local Safeguarding Children Board, said: "The system as a whole let these young boys down and it’s a wake-up call to these agencies to work better together."

(c) Sky News 2017: Agencies missed radicalisation of Abdullah and Jaffar Deghayes