Charges filed against alleged German Islamist
February 4, 2015
Prosecutors in the Bavarian capital said they had charged a 30-year-old Bavarian woman of being involved in a serious act of violence jeopardizing the state.
The public prosecutor's office in Munich said the mother of two of traveled to Syria in 2014, where she helped terrorists prepare attacks on Syria's armed forces. The accused was, however, not planning any attacks in Germany, lawyers said.
She was arrested in Frankfurt in May 2014 on her return to Germany from Syria and could spend up to ten years in prison if found guilty.
The alleged jihadi from Bavaria's Allgäu region was a Catholic who converted to Islam in 2012. Shortly after, she met a German woman online married to an Islamist militant, a member of the terror organization Jabhat al-Nusra.
The extremist took the 30-year-old woman as his second wife, after she came to Syria in 2014 with her two daughters, aged three and seven, with the intention of preparing to fight for the Islamic militants.
Munich officials first began probing the case after the father of the two girls filed a complaint last year.
The self-styled "Islamic State" (IS) has long drawn fighters not just from the Arab world but also from Europe and the US. A study by King's College in London estimates that 3,000 foreigners from Western states are actively involved with IS, with 320 Germans among them.
mg/msh (dpa, AP)