Reviled Aussie terrorist finally has his citizenship revoked: Report

Khaled Sharrouf, the Australian terrorist who posted a picture of his son holding a severed head, has been stripped of his citizenship, The Weekend Australian reports.

The newspaper says that Sharrouf is the first Australian to lose his citizenship under the country’s anti-terrorism laws.

The government made the move to strip him of citizenship early this year, according to The Weekend Australian.

Sharrouf horrified the world in August 2014 when he posted a picture on Twitter of his son, thought to be aged seven at the time, struggling to hold up the severed head of a slain Syrian soldier. The terrorist captioned the picture “That’s my boy.”

In January, Iraqi news agencies reported that Sharrouf had been killed in an airstrike in Mosul. The reports of Sharrouf’s death couldn’t be confirmed at the time, and his family had previously claimed that he’d been imprisoned by Islamic State, the terror group he had been fighting for.

The government passed legislation in December 2015 that allows it revoke a dual-national’s Australian citizenship if the person engages in “terrorist-related conduct.”

The Weekend Australian says Sharrouf, who was born in Sydney, had Australian and Lebanese citizenship,

In July 2016, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called for even tougher anti-terror laws in the wake of big terror attacks in the US and France, and the government passed new laws in December that allows convicted terrorists to be kept in jail after their sentence is complete if they’re still considered a risk to society.

Sharrouf spent four years in an Australian jail for a terror plot, and used his brother’s passport to sneak out of Australia in 2013 to fight for Islamic State because his own passport was revoked at the time. Tara Nettleton, his Australian wife, joined him in Syria in 2014 with their five children, and it was revealed in February 2016 that Nettleton had died from an illness. The whereabouts of the couple’s children is not publicly known. 

The Immigration Department and the Prime Minister’s Office didn’t immediately respond to Starts at 60’s request for comment on Sharrouf.

Do you think Australia’s anti-terror laws are currently tough enough? How do you feel about being an Australian citizen – should it be something that can be taken away from you if you do the wrong thing?