RADICALISTION of young people in Brighton has dominated the city’s news agenda this week after a serious case review into the issue was leaked last weekend.

Some time after the review was launched in 2014, 28 young people from the city were identified by counter-terrorism officials as planning to go to Syria to join IS or other groups, The Sunday Times reported.

The review was launched after the three Deghayes brothers, Amer, 22, Abdullah, 18, and Jaffar, 17, left for Syria in late 2013 and 2014 to join al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Syria. Their friend Ibrahim Kamara, 19, also from Brighton, followed.

As part of the leaked report, officials are also said to have raised fears in March 2014 that some of the 28 identified would try to attack people on the city’s streets using knives or pistols, copying the murder of Lee Rigby.

Dr Imran Awan, from Birmingham City University, said the number was not a huge surprise given the extent of online activity by IS and the way the group plays on youngsters’ grievances.

The threat posed by the internet was echoed by Tariq Jung, of the Brighton and Hove Muslim Forum, who said imams at Brighton’s three main mosques were taking every opportunity to condemn terrorist attacks, such as recent ones in Paris and Pakistan.

Councillor Tom Bewick, chairman of the city’s children, young people and skills committee, said officers were in a much better position to tackle the problem now than two years ago but added there was an “ongoing issue” with young people who had “formed an attachment to a medieval death cult”.

Hove MP Peter Kyle, meanwhile, published a statement saying he recognised the thrust of The Sunday Times story as true.

Our coverage on Monday drew a response from the only surviving Deghayes brother of those who went to Syria: Amer, 22.

He contacted us to say he and his brothers had no links to IS and would never attack Brighton.

The reports in The Argus and other national newspapers sparked a response from Brighton and Hove City Council and Sussex Police saying that roughly 18 months ago they had concerns relating to a number of young people in the city who were considered to be at risk of exploitation.

They added: “Our concerns were not solely about radicalisation. They were as much about their vulnerability to criminal activity and in some cases sexual exploitation.”

As the coverage and discussion of the issue built, The Argus spoke to Pinaki Ghoshal, director of children’s services, and Superintendent James Collis, from Sussex Police.

Mr Ghoshal said officials had identified 28 young people nearly two years ago, some of whom were targeted by groups like IS and al-Qaeda.

One scenario officials had been dealing with, Mr Ghoshal said, was the risk of girls becoming so-called jihadi brides. He added: “I think it has got to be thought of through the lens of exploitation, not the lens of crazy jihadists who are out there to bomb people.”

They declined to give further details on the 28 they had worked with, other than to say they were of mixed gender with at least one girl, were teenagers under 18, and did not all know each other.

They refused to say how many young people officials were dealing with at the moment; how many wards of court to stop them travelling to Syria had been applied for or whether any arrests had been made.

Both said what officials were doing “appears to be working”. None of the 28 had gone to Syria, they added.