Saxony-Anhalt: Alleged IS fighter talkative at the beginning of the process

Naumburg/Halle (dpa/sa) – At the beginning of a trial against a suspected IS fighter, the accused made extensive statements about the allegations. A spokesman for the Naumburg Higher Regional Court said on Tuesday that she would continue her testimony on Wednesday. The hearing took place in the justice center in Halle, closed to the public, since the accused was partly a minor at the time of the alleged crimes. She is accused of having participated in the terrorist militia Islamic State (IS).

The 23-year-old accused is said to have radicalized herself in 2014 as a tenth-grade student at a high school. She later decided to go to the dominion of the terrorist organization Islamic State in order to join them and participate in building a religious fundamentalist state according to Sharia rules, the spokesman said.

She traveled to the IS dominion in Syria, married a German-Tunisian IS fighter and had three children. She is said to have consciously brought up the children in accordance with the IS ideology and received monthly financial allowances from the IS.

In addition, the General Prosecutor’s Office accuses her of appropriating property from the opposing party in violation of international law. It is about the fact that the accused is said to have lived with her husband in various apartments that IS had previously illegally appropriated.

According to the spokesman, the court will probably examine whether and to what extent juvenile criminal law should be applied. Juvenile criminal law has its own system of sanctions, which is largely shaped by the concept of education. The severest sanction in youth criminal law is youth imprisonment, the maximum of which is usually five years.

The woman was arrested by Kurdish militias in 2019 and brought back to Germany with her children by officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office in March. She has been in custody ever since.

A verdict was only recently pronounced against another woman in a similar trial in Halle. Both sides appealed against the imposed two-year suspended sentence.