Cleo Bachelor Amir Millson killed by landmine while fighting for IS

He was Cleo magazine’s most eligible bachelor and dreamt of a career on TV — now for the first time we can reveal this Australian dad’s death on the battlefield as a “martyr” jihadist.

Exclusive: Amir Millson seemed to have it all. Born in Perth to a white father and Malaysian mother, he was so good-looking and had such easy charm that he took himself to Malaysia where he won Cleo magazine’s Most Eligible Bachelor in 2010.

Millson’s transformation and shocking death as a battlefield jihadist in 2016 — revealed here for the first time — is difficult to fathom.

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Amir Millson strikes a pose ahead of the Cleo Bachelor contest in 2010. Picture: Supplied

At the age of 27, he studied mass communications at Curtin University, did part-time modelling and planned to become a television presenter.

Videos he posted from the time show a laid-back, tuned-in, metrosexual. He told Cleo he wanted to be prime minister and thought Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom were a cool couple.

He married a Perth woman and they had a son. Then he started attending prayer groups and grew a goatee. By 2014, he viewed his former life as frivolous and without meaning.

Junaid Thorne, among other so-called Islamic instructors who hold extreme views, had appeared in his world.

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It is hard to comprehend the conversion that saw him join the more than 220 Australians who’ve taken themselves to fight overseas (68 of whom have been killed).

Amir Millson was a part-time model with dreams of a TV career. Picture: Supplied

Millson was on the fringes of a crew including a young Libyan living in Perth named Mohammed Sheglabo, who disappeared in late 2014 at the age of 23. After he posted photos of himself in Syria in early 2015, armed to fight for IS, he’s never been heard from since.

Sheglabo’s father, who lives in Perth, is a study in tragedy. “Have you heard anything?” he erupts when contacted last week. That’s what I was going to ask him. “No, no, no, nothing,” he says, trailing off in despair.

Millson’s crowd also included several of the so-called tinny terrorists, who allegedly tried to set off for war from north Queensland by boat after their passports were cancelled.

Millson, however, kept a low profile as an emerging radical. His large family in Perth didn’t want to talk, but it’s understood they never knew his plans.

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One young man who was a friend to Sheglabo and Millson — and whose passport has also been cancelled — revealed they had received messages from the battlefield.

“We heard when he died,” the friend said. “He was carrying a fighter on his shoulder when he stepped on a landmine. That was it.”

In September, ASIO also confirmed Millson had been “killed fighting with ISIL” in information it provided to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which was examining the passport cancellation of one of his associates.

Millson’s conversion to radical Islam was a “gradual process”, according to the friend. “When I met him he was already religious. For him, it was the whole thing — the oppression of Muslims, the Assad regime.

“He was handsome, very open, outgoing, extremely friendly. He was brave and courageous.

“He always spoke his mind. Before he left he made sure there were no strings attached. If money was owed, he paid it off. He was a great father and great husband.”

Would a great father and husband leave his family for jihad? “Well, he was divorced by then and she had custody of their son,” the friend says.

“We don’t know for sure who he fought with, whether it was IS or other anti-Assad forces. He was a frontline fighter assigned to a commander. The way he died, he was a martyr.”

2010 Cleo Bachelor winner Amir Millson. Picture: Cleo

The friend says IS turned out to be much different to what many thought. “There shouldn’t have been so much bloodshed,” he says. “It was very gruesome.”

Yet he sees Millson as a martyr.

Originally published as Cleo Bachelor Amir Millson killed by landmine while fighting for IS