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The trial took place at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg
Photo: Rainer Herzog / imageBROKER / picture alliance
The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court sentenced a woman returning from Syria to a youth sentence of two years and nine months in prison for membership in a terrorist organization abroad.
The charges against the 25-year-old have been confirmed, said a spokesman for the State Security Senate (file number: 3 St 1/21).
According to this, the Hamburg native with German-Ghanaian citizenship traveled to Syria in September 2014 as a 17-year-old of her own volition.
She followed her husband at the time, who had started combat training with the "Islamic State" (IS).
The couple lived with their children, born in 2015 and 2017, in the IS stronghold of Raqqa.
The terrorist organization paid her a monthly allowance.
With the flag of the "Islamic State" and an assault rifle, the woman posed for propaganda photos and advertised the terrorist organization via WhatsApp.
Violence-oriented worldview
The defendant had denied at the beginning of November that she was a member of IS. She only wanted to try life in Syria and was just a housewife there. The court held this statement to be refuted. Chat messages, photos, videos and testimonies show that the defendant shared the violence-oriented worldview of IS when she left for Syria and confessed to the terrorist organization. She raised her children according to the jihadist ideology.
At the beginning of 2019, the woman from Hamburg was arrested by Kurdish security forces and later picked up by Turkish forces.
In May 2020 she was transferred to Germany with her now three children.
The 25-year-old has been in custody since the end of September.
According to her own statements, she is heavily pregnant again and is expecting her fourth child in January.
lukewarm / dpa