14 Years’ Jail for German Islamic State Woman Who Let Child Slave Die In Iraq
A German woman who joined the extremist Islamic State group in Iraq has been sentenced to 14 years in prison by a court in Munich for allowing a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband kept as a slave to die of thirst while chained up in the blazing sun.
The decision increased the woman’s earlier sentence of 10 years in jail imposed by the Munich state court.
The woman, identified only as Jennifer W. in line with German privacy rules, had appealed against the 10-year sentence to the Federal Court of Justice, which threw out her appeal and partly approved an appeal by prosecutors, ordering a new sentencing hearing.
The case was then sent back to the Munich state court, which ordered the increased sentence.
The 32-year-old woman, from Lohne in Lower Saxony, was convicted of a number of crimes, including enslavement resulting in death.
She confessed that she and her then-husband had kept the girl and her mother as slaves in their home in Iraq. In the summer of 2015, the man had chained the child in the midday sun to punish her, and the woman confessed that she watched the girl die. She also held a gun to the mother’s head to make her stop crying.
The woman was arrested in 2016 while trying to renew her identity papers at the German Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, and was deported to Germany. Her former husband, an Iraqi citizen identified only as Taha Al-J., was convicted by a Frankfurt court in November 2021 of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and bodily harm resulting in death, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Munich court said the woman’s behavior showed contempt for human life, and the girl’s mother was still suffering serious psychological consequences today.
