German federal prosecutors on Monday charged an Iraqi couple with enslavement, torture and war crimes for allegedly holding two Yazidi girls captive as slaves and subjecting them to sexual and physical abuse.
The couple, identified as Towana HS and Asia RA under German privacy laws, were arrested in April in the southern state of Bavaria.
The two men are also suspected of being members of the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in Iraq and Syria from October 2015 to December 2017, prosecutors said in a statement.
What are the charges against the couple?
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.
According to prosecutors, the couple bought the two children in an Iraqi bazaar.
The man is accused of raping the girls, and the woman is said to have prepared a room and put makeup on one of the girls.
Prosecutors said the couple subjected the girls to “severe physical violence,” forcing them to work constantly and beating them.
The suspects are said to have handed the girls over to other IS members before leaving Syria in November 2017.
“All this served the organization’s goal of destroying the Yazidi religion,” prosecutors said in a statement.
The Yazidi religious minority lives primarily in northern Iraq. In 2014, it became a target of IS.
ftm/nm (dpa, ap)
