Munich Court Sentences Iraqi Man to Life Imprisonment for Enslavement of Yazidi Girls
A 45-year-old Iraqi man has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Munich for holding two Yazidi girls as slaves, sexually abusing and torturing them together with his ex-wife.
Munich Court Sentences Iraqi Man to Life Imprisonment for Enslavement of Yazidi Girls
A court in Munich has sentenced a 45-year-old man from Iraq to life imprisonment. Together with his former wife, he had held two Yazidi girls as slaves over a period of years, mistreated and sexually abused them. The ex-wife was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison.
The man came to Germany in 2000 and initially worked as a hairdresser in Munich. He later became radicalised at a local mosque and travelled to the Middle East in 2015. There he stayed in areas controlled by the terrorist organisation Islamic State (IS).
In 2015, the couple purchased a five-year-old Yazidi girl and enslaved her. The child was held captive for more than two years in Iraq and Syria, exploited, sexually abused and tortured in other ways. Later, another Yazidi girl, whom the couple purchased in October 2017 at the age of twelve, suffered the same fate.
Both children had to work for the couple, manage the household and were simultaneously forced to receive ideological training according to the terrorist organisation's ideology. According to the charges, the man beat and raped the girls. His wife is said to have supported these acts. She allegedly prepared the room before the sexual assaults and applied make-up to one of the girls.
The children were subjected to the whims and perversion of the couple. The man beat the girls with broomsticks and other objects; the woman poured hot water on the younger girl's hands to scald her. Both girls were frequently forced to stand on one leg as punishment.
When the terrorist organisation Islamic State was driven out of the occupied territories at the end of 2017, both perpetrators fled Syria. However, the girls did not gain freedom. The couple handed them over in November 2017 to other Islamic State fighters.
The older of the two girls was later ransomed by her family and testified before the Munich court. The fate of the younger child remains unclear.
The torture couple returned to Germany from the Middle East in 2018. In April 2024, investigators arrested the woman in Regensburg and the man in the Roth district. Both were charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The terrorist organisation Islamic State controlled vast areas in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, before being defeated in its last strongholds in Syria in 2019.
The Yazidis, an ancient religious minority, were regarded by the Islamic State organisation as devil-worshippers. More than 5,000 of them were killed by the terrorists, 7,000 Yazidi women and girls were enslaved and the majority of the Yazidi community, which numbered 550,000 members, were expelled from their original homeland in northern Iraq.
Source: Novinky.cz
Source: Novinky.cz