German court convicts ISIS member for Yezidi girl’s death
ERBIL, KRG, Iraq (North Press) – A German court sentenced an Iraqi man to life for crimes against Yezidis in Iraq.
German news agency (dpa) quoted the presiding judge, Christoph Koller, saying it was the first genocide conviction worldwide over a person’s role in the systematic persecution by ISIS of the Yezidi religious minority.
The judges of the Frankfurt Court in Germany deemed Taha al-Jumailly guilty of enslaving the five-year-old in 2015, chaining her up and leaving her to die of thirst.
His German wife was sentenced last month to 10 years in prison over the girl’s death.
Yezidi women were captives by ISIS militants and killed hundreds of men after they overran the Sinjar region in northwest Iraq in August 2014.
The accused and his German ex-wife, Jennifer W., had together kept the girl and her mother as slaves for at least one month.
The mother of the child, the main witness in front of the court, recounted the tragedy that her child suffered “while hanging on a window outside the house, where the temperature sometimes reached more than 50 degrees Celsius,” according to what the Public Prosecution said.
After being constantly mistreated, the girl was punished for urinating on her bed.
Earlier this month, the prosecutor said during the pleadings that the 31-year-old jihadist was believed to have tied the girl to a window in the scorching heat before she died of thirst.
The prosecutor added that the accused jihadist was a member of the Islamic State (ISIS) and behaved in accordance with ISIS’ ideology.
The prosecutor pointed out that the mother suffered severe burns when she was forced to stand outside in temperatures of 50C, and that she was repeatedly beaten.
She was also forced to perform work for free and to practice the rituals of the Islamic faith by the accused.
The woman (the mother of the victim child) is still suffering great physical and spiritual damage and has demanded 50,000 euros as compensation for the damage. The court ruled this amount of compensation in the verdict issued today.
The man was arrested in Greece in May 2019 before being deported to Germany in October of the same year.
A Düsseldorf court has sentenced a German national to 10 years behind bars for murder on Friday. The man, named as Nils D. under German privacy laws, tortured a man to death at a prison run by the Islamic State (ISIS) militants in Manbij, Syria, in 2014.