SpaceWar.com - Your World At War
German IS woman on trial accused of letting Yazidi 'slave' girl die of thirst
Berlin, April 9 (AFP) Apr 09, 2019
A German woman who joined the Islamic State jihadist group goes on trial Tuesday accused of the war crime of letting a five-year-old "slave" girl die of thirst.

Prominent London-based human rights lawyer Amal Clooney is part of the team representing the dead Yazidi girl's mother, but Clooney was not expected to appear in the Munich trial on Tuesday.

The defendant, identified only as Jennifer W., 27, faces life in jail if found guilty of committing a war crime, murder, membership in a terrorist organisation and weapons offences.

According to news weekly Der Spiegel, the defendant, herself the mother of a small girl, had incriminated herself while talking at length to an undercover FBI informant in a bugged car.

German prosecutors allege her IS husband had purchased the Yazidi child and her mother -- a co-plaintiff in the trial -- as household "slaves" whom they held captive while living in then IS-occupied Mosul, Iraq, in 2015.

"After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the husband of the accused chained her up outside as punishment and let the child die an agonising death of thirst in the scorching heat," prosecutors charge.

"The accused allowed her husband to do so and did nothing to save the girl."

German media said the defendant's husband, Taha Sabah Noori Al-J., had beaten both the Yazidi mother and child, and that Jennifer W. allegedly also once held a pistol to the woman's head.

The trial will start at 0730 GMT under tight security in a Munich court that deals with state security and terrorism cases, with hearings initially scheduled until September 30.


- FBI informant -


Jennifer W., who reportedly left school after the eighth grade and converted to Islam in 2013, left Germany in August 2014 and travelled via Turkey and Syria to Iraq where she joined the IS.

Recruited in mid-2015 to an "anti-vice squad" of the group's self-styled Hisba morality police, she patrolled city parks in IS-occupied Fallujah and Mosul.

Armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, a pistol and an explosives vest, her task was to ensure that women complied with IS behaviour and clothing regulations, said prosecutors.

In January 2016, months after the Yazidi child's death, Jennifer W. visited the German embassy in Ankara to apply for new identity papers.

When she left the mission, she was arrested by Turkish security services and extradited several days later to Germany.

For lack of actionable evidence against her at the time, she was allowed to return to her home in the German state of Lower Saxony, but quickly sought to return to IS territory.

Der Spiegel reported that an FBI informant had posed as an accomplice who offered to take Jennifer W. back to the IS "caliphate", and who chatted with her in a bugged car while they drove through Germany.

Jennifer W. allegedly said that the death of the little girl had been "hard-core even for the IS" and unjust because only God had the right to use fire as punishment.

Her husband had later been beaten as punishment by the IS, she said.

Police followed close behind her vehicle for several hours and listened to a live audio feed as Jennifer W. spoke and then arrested her at a highway stop.

Clooney, the wife of Hollywood star George Clooney, has been involved in a campaign with Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, a former IS sex slave, to have the IS crimes against the Yazidi minority be recognised as a "genocide".


ADVERTISEMENT




Space News from SpaceDaily.com
China Focus: Chinese scientist details first planned Mars sample-return mission Tianwen 3
NASA says it will lose about 20 percent of its workforce
Building blocks of life found in distant star system suggest origins in interstellar space

24/7 Energy News Coverage
Trump administration expected to say greenhouse gases aren't harmful
MicroCarb satellite launches to map global carbon dioxide emissions from space
Rollable solar array by GalaxySpace redefines satellite compactness and power efficiency

Military Space News, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense
Airbus CO3D satellites begin mission to generate high precision global 3D map
BlackSky to supply satellite imagery and analytics for Latin American security operations
GovSat selects Thales Alenia Space to build secure satellite for military communications

24/7 News Coverage
First wildfire images reveal FireSat's unmatched detection capabilities
MetOp Second Generation satellite fully fuelled ahead of August launch
MicroCarb satellite launch marks new era in urban carbon tracking



All rights reserved. Copyright Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.