German prosecutors probe Ezidi survivor’s claim of IS abuser walking freely

German prosecutors on Saturday said they are taking seriously a Yezidi (Ezidi) refugee’s claim that she ran into her former Islamic State (IS) captor twice in Germany, and that more information was needed to identify him.

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – German prosecutors on Saturday said they are taking seriously a Yezidi (Ezidi) refugee’s claim that she ran into her former Islamic State (IS) captor twice in Germany, and that more information was needed to identify him.

Ashwaq Hamid Ta’lo, a 19-year-old Ezidi girl rescued from IS after she was taken in 2014, told Kurdistan 24 she has returned to the Kurdistan Region from Germany after repeatedly running into the same man who bought her in Mosul and abused her.

She claimed German authorities were unwilling to act on her concerns, leaving her shocked and afraid to walk the streets where she might risk seeing him again.

“The young woman was interviewed, but the information [she provided] wasn’t precise enough,” Frauke Koehler, a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors, told AP on Saturday.

When authorities tried to follow up, the woman had already left Germany, Koehler stated.

“I recognized his face very clearly, and whenever I see him, I can recognize him ... because of the beatings he gave us,” Ta’lo said. “We saw him 24 hours a day. So anytime or anywhere I see him, I would be able to identify him.”

Speaking to Kurdistan 24 at a camp in the Kurdistan Region’s Duhok province, she explained that she was captured and enslaved by the extremist group in 2014 after IS occupied Sinjar (Shingal), in the Nineveh province near the Syrian border, where the ethnoreligious minority group primarily lived.

She escaped IS and fled to the Kurdistan Region, where she was then sent to Germany as part of a program that provides psychological treatment to victims of abuse. It was Germany she claims to have seen her captor twice, once in 2016, and once more in February 2018.

After reporting the incident to German police, Ta’lo was left disappointed as police told her they could not arrest him without any evidence.

According to Ta’lo, she was afraid of being kidnapped by the same IS abuser in Germany and decided to return to the Kurdistan Region and live with her father in a camp for displaced persons.

In the Ta’lo family alone, IS kidnapped 77 relatives since 2014. Forty-one of them are yet to be rescued or found, according to her father, Hajji Hamid Ta’lo.

Editing by Nadia Riva