She is said to have watched idly as her husband let an enslaved Yazidi girl die in the Iraqi midday heat: On Thursday (9.30 a.m.) the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) announced a verdict in the case of IS returnee Jennifer W. from Lower Saxony. The Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG) sentenced the woman to ten years in prison in October 2021. The federal prosecutor considers this sentence to be too low.
W.’s Iraqi ex-husband, who chained the five-year-old to a grating in the yard, has already been sentenced to life imprisonment, also for genocide. He had bought the girl and her mother as slaves after they had been abducted by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist militia.
More than 50 degrees in the shade
The girl died on a day in August or September 2015 when high temperatures exceeded 50 degrees in the shade. The man wanted to punish the sick child for wetting himself on a mattress. To do this, he tied it to a window grille in the blazing sun with his hands at head height. By the time he untied the girl, she had suffered fatal heat stroke.
When the verdict was announced at the Higher Regional Court, the presiding judge, Joachim Baier, said that the accused “had to reckon with the fact that the child who was tied up in the heat of the sun was in mortal danger.” Nevertheless, she did nothing to help the girl. The court ruled in favor of Jennifer W. that she only had limited opportunities to end the enslavement of mother and daughter.
It’s about the range of punishment and the amount of punishment
The woman from Lohne, who joined IS at the age of 23, was convicted of, among other things, a crime against humanity that resulted in death. She had originally been charged with murder, but federal prosecutors had asked for a life sentence. Jennifer W. also appealed against her conviction. At the end of January, however, the BGH had only negotiated the revision of the federal prosecutor’s office. This is limited to the range of penalties and the level of punishment.
Yazidis are Kurds from Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. They form a religious minority. In 2014, IS murdered more than 5,000 members of this religious community. Women and girls were abducted, enslaved and raped. The Bundestag recognized the crimes as genocide in January.
