Our son the terror suspect: Jack Letts’s parents on the fight to save their child

Sitting talking to Sally Lane and John Letts at their dining table in their terraced house in Oxford, a series of questions nag in my head. One is: “What might be the limits to parental love?” As husband and wife piece together once again the story of how their eldest son, Jack, then 18, took himself off to Jordan on holiday five years ago and ended up in the newly formed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – a journey that eventually landed him in a Kurdish prison camp and put them through a hellish court ordeal – it is hard not to wonder just a little about that word “unconditional”.

Their recent court case at the Old Bailey, three and a half years after their initial arrests, itself seemed designed to test that idea to breaking point. Letts, 58, an organic farmer, and Lane, 57, who had worked in publishing and for the NHS, were convicted on one charge of “funding terrorism”, and acquitted of another. A third charge was left on file after the jury failed to reach a verdict. Their crime had been to send, at the request of their son, the sum of £223 to an intermediary in Lebanon in September 2015, in part to pay for a pair of glasses. There was no suggestion that they believed they were sending the money to Isis, the court accepted, but it found them guilty of knowing there was a risk that the cash might fall into the wrong hands.

They were found not guilty of trying and failing to wire a further payment of £1,000 later that year. That was needed, they believed, for Jack to pay a people-smuggler to help him escape the “caliphate” after he had denounced Isis as “un-Islamic” and had apparently been on the run in fear of his life.

Letts and Lane were sentenced to 15 months in prison, suspended for a year. The investigation and legal case cost an estimated £7m. The verdict and sentence were, in Lane’s view, engineered so “everyone went home happy. All that money did not appear to have been wasted. We didn’t go to prison. The prosecutor was beaming at the verdict, because