BERLIN (AP) – German federal prosecutors on Monday charged an Iraqi couple with enslavement, torture and war crimes for holding two young Yazidi girls captive as slaves and subjecting them to sexual and physical abuse. Indicted.
The man and woman, identified only as Towana HS and Asia RA according to German privacy rules, were arrested in Bavaria in April.
Prosecutors said in a statement that they were members of the Islamic State group, which was active in Iraq and Syria from October 2015 to December 2017. They are said to have kept a 5-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave since late 2015, and a 12-year-old girl since October 2017.
Prosecutors alleged that the man repeatedly raped the two girls, and that the woman prepared a room and applied make-up to one of the girls.
Prosecutors said the couple also subjected the girls to “severe physical violence,” preventing them from practicing their religion and forcing them to do housework and raise children.
On one occasion, a man is accused of hitting an older girl with a broomstick, a woman is accused of scalding a younger girl's hands with boiling water, and both children are forced to stand on one leg for 30 minutes as punishment. was forced repeatedly.
The suspects handed over the girls to other IS members before leaving Syria in November 2017, prosecutors said in a statement.
“All this served the organization's objective of destroying Yazidiism,” the statement said.
