The young woman left her home to become the third wife of German jihadist Martin Lemke, a senior member of the IS secret services, in Syria.
The German justice judges from this Tuesday in Halle (east) a 22-year-old German who joined the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) in Syria when she was 15, accused of being an accessory to crimes against humanity.
The young woman, identified by German media as Leonora M., left her home in Sangerhausen, in the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt (east) in 2015, to become in Syria the third wife of German jihadist Martin Lemke, a high-ranking ISIS secret services.
According to information from the Naumburg Regional Court, responsible for the procedure, the defendant resided between 2015 and 2017 in the Syrian city of Raqqa, where she carried out household chores “that corresponded to her according to the IS ideology, thus facilitating her husband’s activities”.
The process takes place in the city of Halle and not in Naumburg, where the court is based, for security reasons.
According to the prosecution, Leonora M. also carried out autonomous tasks for the secret services of the jihadist organization, spying on the wives of other IS members and trying to recruit women residing in Germany to the cause.
While still a minor,The accused received from the organization a semi-automatic pistol and an assault rifle, always according to the prosecution, and She also dedicated herself to promoting human trafficking by her husband.
Thus, he helped convalesce an injured Yazidi woman “bought” by her jihadist husband to increase her price for a later sale and tried during this period to convince her to convert to Islam.
repatriated to Germany
At the beginning of 2019, Leonora M. surrendered with her husband to the authorities of the autonomous zone in northern Syria and was interned in a camp for relatives of IS, before being repatriated in 2020 by the German government together with her two daughters.
Since the defendant was a minor when the events occurred, she faces a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.l, although there is a possibility that the court decides to try her as an adult since she turned 18 while in Syria.
The case of Leonora M. reached a great media echo since a team from the German network NDR followed her father for four years in his attempts to convince his daughter to return home.
As reported yesterday by a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry, the government has so far repatriated 42 children and 12 mothers of German nationality from detention camps for relatives of IS in northern Syria.
The spokesman added that there are more repatriations “planned”, but due to the support of various actors necessary for these actions “it will be a while” before it is possible to carry them out. (I)
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