On Thursday, the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court sentenced 23-year-old Sarah O. from Constance to six and a half years imprisonment for membership in the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (IS) “in unity with a crime against humanity resulting in death by enslavement”.
The trial against Sarah O. and her in-laws from Cologne was conducted in camera, as O. was still a young person at part of the time of the crime.
Pure burger
Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.
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The high school student Sarah O. had left her family in Konstanz on Lake Constance at the age of 15 to join IS in Syria.
There, in 2014, according to Islamic law, she married the Cologne-based ISmail fighter Ismail S. whose parents Perihan and Ahmet S., according to the conviction of the court, supported Sarah O. and her two sons and thus supported the terrorist organization.
The 7th Criminal Senate of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court sentenced the mother-in-law to four and a half years and the father-in-law to three years in prison.
The couple knew that their sons had joined IS in Syria.
Nevertheless, they would have supported the two with money, weapons accessories and equipment.
Approved rape
Sarah O. in turn, together with her husband Ismail S., kept a total of five Yezidi women and two underage Yezidi girls as slaves. Three of them appeared as joint plaintiffs in the proceedings. Ismail S. raped two of the three co-plaintiffs with the consent of Sarah O., according to the court's finding. She "considered it necessary according to the rules of IS" and even encouraged her husband to do so. According to the judgment, a 14-year-old female slave was killed during a journey approved by Sarah O. over a road link that was under fire.
As the downfall of IS progressed, Sarah O. fled to Turkey, from where the young woman was eventually deported to Germany. When Sarah O. finally arrived at Düsseldorf Airport with her three children in September 2018, she was immediately arrested.