A mother has been left desperate for news of her daughters after their father took them to Libya and refused to bring them back.

The man has now been jailed for a year after failing to return the girls, aged five and 17, to their mother's home in Wiltshire.

Tanya Borg has not been able to speak to her children since March this year and has no idea where they are being kept in the conflict-ridden country and how well they are.

Her ordeal began in February 2015, after she agreed with her estranged husband Mohammed Said Masoud El Zubaidy that he could take the two girls to visit their grandmother in Tunisia.

But instead he whisked them across the border to Libya and has since refused to arrange for their return to the UK.

Adding to Ms Borg’s agony is the fact El-Zubaidy has told his family not to let her speak to the children, something the judge in the case has described as “a wicked thing to do”.

Ms Borg, a British national who was born in Malta, met El-Zubaidy on the Mediterranean island and married him in 2000.

The couple settled in Britain two years later.

Libyan-born El Zubaidy, of Wood Green, north London, took the children to visit their grandmother in the Tunisia, after Ms Borg had agreed to the visit.