Financial support Geneva parents of IS fighter stand trial
The parents of an IS fighter who converted to radical Islam will have to answer to the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona today, Monday.
19.08.2024, 06:08
19.08.2024, 08:48
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- The parents of a Swiss IS fighter are accused of financially supporting the Islamic State.
- Their son once went to war in Syria and has been languishing in a Kurdish prison camp for over five years.
The parents transferred around CHF 50,000 to their son in Syria between 2016 and 2019 and have therefore been charged with violating al-Qaeda/IS law.
The young Swiss man converted to Islam and is a follower of the Salafist-jihadist ideology. He left Switzerland in April 2015 to join the terrorist militia Islamic State (IS) in Syria, where he received military and religious training.
In Syria, he married a French woman who was also radicalized, according to the indictment of the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG). The young man was captured by Kurdish forces in June 2019 and remains in extremely precarious conditions in a prison in north-eastern Syria, which is administered by the Kurdish autonomous authority. The man is the subject of separate proceedings opened by the OAG.
With a check and middlemen
The OAG accuses the parents, who are Swiss nationals living in the canton of Geneva, of transferring a total of around CHF 50,000 to their son between September 2016 and May 2019 at his request. The money is said to have benefited the victim, his wife, a friend and IS.
The payments amounted to between a few dozen and several thousand francs. In some cases, they were made via Western Union. However, the parents also used Ticket Premium, an anonymous checking system that allows payments to be made online anonymously and without a bank account.
For some larger amounts, the money was passed on from one intermediary to the next. In May 2019, for example, the fighter's mother allegedly handed over 40,000 francs to two people who had traveled from Berlin especially for this purpose, according to the OAG. Of this, 20,000 francs came from the repurchase of a life insurance policy of the accused.
"Human drama"
For the defense lawyer, the human drama is at the forefront of the case, as the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" writes: First, the parents had lost their son, who had grown up Catholic, to IS; later, they had lost almost all their belongings because they had given in to his insistence on financial support.
The public prosecutor's office will announce its motions during the main hearing. The trial is expected to last one to two days. (Case SK.2024.4)