A jihadist who left to join the Islamic State in Syria at the age of 15 was sentenced on Wednesday May 18 in Germany to a two-year suspended prison sentence, announced a spokesperson for the High Regional Court of Naumburg (East).
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Tried in Halle (east) behind closed doors since the end of January, Leonora Messing, now 22 years old and mother of two children, was found guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization. On the other hand, the judges did not retain the charges of complicity in crimes against humanity in connection with the abuses committed against the Yazidi minority and considered by German justice to be genocide.
She joined Syria alone in 2015
The prosecution accused her of having helped, in June 2015, her jihadist husband to “to buya woman from this Kurdish-speaking minority in Iraq enslaved by IS. But the judges considered that this could not be demonstrated during the hearings which took place in the absence of any public, Leonora Messing being a minor at the time of the facts. His highly publicized story in Germany had aroused circumspection. Originally from a rural town in the former GDR without any mosque in the region, the teenager had run away in March 2015 to reach Syria alone.
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The young girl, a majorette during the carnival and who offered make-up videos on the internet, had previously converted to Islam before espousing the most radical theses. Shortly after settling in Raqa, “capital citySelf-proclaimed from the jihadist organization, she had become the third wife of a German from her region. The teenager’s father had discovered his daughter’s conversion to radical Islam after her disappearance. He then came across photos of the teenager in a niqab.
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Having become the mother of two little girls, the young woman ended up being detained in a camp under Kurdish control in northern Syria. Her husband, Martin Lemke, was captured in 2019 by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Leonora Messing and another of his wives told AFP. In December 2020, she was repatriated to Germany during one of the operations organized by Berlin, which has repatriated 91 people since 2019, the majority of them children (69). Arrested on her arrival in Frankfurt, she was later released.
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