The French anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office on Tuesday opened its first-ever genocide case against a French citizen, a jihadist it has charged with enslaving and torturing a Yazidi teenager.
Sonia Mejri, 35, is suspected of having “inflicted acute mental suffering,” “deprivation of food and water” and physical violence on a Yazidi woman who had been kidnapped at the age of 16 and raped by Mejri’s husband — a leader within ISIS — in Syria.
French anti-terrorism prosecutors told POLITICO that Mejri was issued with charges of genocide against the Yazidi religious group, and of: “Crimes against humanity, including enslavement, imprisonment or any other form of severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution of the Yazidi group on religious and gender grounds and other inhumane acts.”
Mejri ran a snack bar in France before leaving the country in 2014 to move to a part of Syria in the territory of the pseudo-caliphate of the Islamic State group, Le Monde reports. Here, she married Abdelnasser Benyoucef, a Franco-Algerian man who was considered a key member of the external operations cell of the Islamic State group.
Benyoucef, who is presumed to have died in combat in 2016, has already been convicted in absentia in France for having ordered the failed attack against the church in Villejuif, on the outskirts of Paris, in 2015, Le Monde reports. He was also charged with genocide Tuesday.
According to a judge, the Yazidi woman, now 25, had been “kidnapped, humiliated and raped by several jihadists for six years” including Benyoucef who then sold her to another “torturer” and senior leader of the Islamic State group, French media BFMTV reports.
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