“If I could go back, I would do it better…”, declared the 29-year-old young woman at the start of her trial.
The young woman, accused of having attempted to slaughter two women in a department store in 2020 in Switzerland by chanting her devotion to the Islamic State, expressed no remorse on Monday August 29 at the opening of her trial.
“If I could go back, I would do it better… with accomplices“, declared the young woman, 29, in front of the federal criminal court in Bellinzona (south). She assured to haveprogram“an attack from”months, years” for “do something for the islamic state» and show that she was also «capable of carrying out a terrorist act“.
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On November 24, 2020, she attempted to slaughter two women in a department store in Lugano, an Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, after buying a knife there. One of the two victims, who is attending the trial, had been seriously injured in the neck. The second, injured in the hand, had managed to control the assailant with other people. During the projection of a photo of a neck injury, the accused, of a Swiss father and a Serbian mother, remained calm. “It didn’t go as deep as I thought“, she observed, then repeating”It has no effect on me“.
Dressed in black, as stipulated by the court rules, she wore a long tunic, tights and ballerina shoes, as well as, at the start of the hearing, a sanitary mask (also black) and a hood covering her head and that she agreed to remove. “I am muslim“, she said, a slight smile on her face, to justify her desire to keep the hood, before complying after a few minutes of discussion with the rules of the court.
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According to the indictment of the Public Ministry of the Confederation (MPC, Attorney General), the young woman, whose name the court does not want to be published, acted “intentionally” and “without any scruples“. During the attack, she repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “I will avenge the prophet Muhammad», and declared «I’m here for IS“, in reference to the jihadist group Islamic State.
On Monday, the young woman, with long black hair, recounted her epileptic seizures during childhood followed by an adolescence marked by anorexia, and hairdressing or sales assistant internships. Very comfortable during her interrogation, she answered the court’s questions at length, sometimes interrupting her answers with a kind of nervous laughter.
Prostitution
In contact with psychologists and psychiatrists since her childhood, she indicated that she is still currently being followed in prison, where she is taking a treatment that she does not like and which makes her “nervous“. She explained that she became pregnant at 17 from her future husband, of Afghan origin, whom she married at 19 and from whom she ended up divorcing last year. “It started out good, then things went badshe said, explaining that her husband didn’t want her to study or have an abortion. Not wishing to take care of the unborn child, she entrusted him to his parents, who adopted him.
She is on trial forrepeated assassination attemptsand violating the section of federal law banning the jihadist groups al-Qaeda and Islamic State. In particular, she is accused of having wanted to commit a “terrorist actin the name of IS. She must also answer to the accusation of “repeated illicit practice of prostitutionbetween 2017 and 2020.
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The defense assured that they would rely on his mental state to refute the motive “terroristand plead attempted homicide. Experts are to be heard during the day and on Tuesday. She was already known to the police before the attack, because she had tried to join a jihadist fighter in Syria, whom she had fallen in love with on the networks in 2017. She had been arrested at the Turkish-Syrian border and sent back to Switzerland then placed in a psychiatric institution. The hearing is scheduled to last until Thursday, and judgment is expected on September 19.
Switzerland has never experienced a large-scale jihadist attack but two knife attacks in 2020: a few weeks before Lugano, a young Turkish-Swiss national, who had sought to travel to Syria in 2019, had fatally stabbed a passerby in a street in Morges (west).
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