A New York woman has been charged with obtaining $62,000 (£63,000) in Bitcoin which was sent to support the Islamic State.

Zoobia Shahnaz, a 27-year-old lab technician, was arrested at her home in Brentwood, on Long Island, on Wednesday night.

She appeared before Magistrate Judge Kathleen Tomlinson on Thursday afternoon and was remanded in custody, to appear again in court in January.

Shahnaz, a US citizen born in Pakistan, is accused of defrauding a series of American banks and sending the money through Pakistan, China and Turkey to fund the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

She is believed to have become radicalised online, and as early as August 2015 began searching for information on joining the Islamic State, with Google search records showing that she looked for "hijrah", or holy migration.

In January 2016 she volunteered to work with the Syrian American Medical Society in Jordan. She spent two weeks in Amman, the Jordanian capital, and in the Zataari refugee camp - described in court documents as a place "where ISIS exercises significant influence."

On returning to the US she provided fake information to obtain bank loans and over a dozen credit cards, and then transferred the money into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.