German court sentences ISIL member to 10 years in prison
Monday’s conviction of Jennifer Wenisch, 30, by Munich’s Higher Regional Court marked one of the first court rulings anywhere in the world on ISIL’s persecution of the Yazidi community.
A Munich court has sentenced a German woman who joined ISIL (ISIS) to 10 years in prison after she was found guilty of allowing a five-year-old Yazidi girl that she and her husband had enslaved to die of thirst in the sun.
Monday’s conviction of Jennifer Wenisch, 30, by Munich’s Higher Regional Court marked one of the first court rulings anywhere in the world on ISIL’s persecution of the Yazidi community.
Presiding judge Joachim Baier found her guilty of “two crimes against humanity in the form of enslavement”, aiding and abetting the girl’s killing by failing to offer help and membership of a “terrorist” organisation.
Wenisch and her then-husband and ISIL fighter Taha al-Jumailly had allegedly “purchased” the child and a Yazidi woman as household “slaves”, whom they held captive while living in then ISIL-occupied Mosul, Iraq, in 2015.
Federal prosecutors had accused Wenisch, from Lohne in Lower Saxony, of later standing by as al-Jumailly chained the child in a courtyard and left her to die of thirst.
“After the girl fell ill and wet her mattress, the husband of the accused chained her up outside as punishment and let the child die an agonising death of thirst in the scorching heat,” prosecutors told the trial.
They called for her to be handed a life sentence. Wenisch’s legal team had meanwhile pleaded for her to be given a maximum prison sentence of two years.
‘Defenceless’
The Yazidi child was “defenceless and helplessly exposed to the situation,” Baier said on Monday, according to the DPA news agency.
He added that Wenisch “had to reckon from the beginning that the child … was in danger of dying”, but had done nothing to help the girl.
Wenisch grew up as a Protestant but converted to Islam in 2013.
