German prosecutors probe Yazidi woman’s claim about IS man

BERLIN — German prosecutors say they are taking seriously a Yazidi refugee’s claim that she ran into her former Islamic State captor twice in Germany, but say they need more information to identify him.

The case of 19-year-old Ashwaq Haji Hami made headlines this week after she was quoted telling the Iraqi-Kurdish news portal basnews that she returned to her homeland of Iraq for fear that her alleged tormentor could harm her in Germany. Several reports in foreign media suggested that German authorities were unwilling to act on the woman’s claims.

“The young woman was interviewed but the information (she provided) wasn’t precise enough,” Frauke Koehler, a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors, told The Associated Press on Saturday. When authorities tried to follow up, the woman had already left Germany, Koehler said.

The AP, however, spoke to the woman at a camp for displaced people near Shekhan in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

Hami says she was captured by the Islamic State group in August 2014, and enslaved and abused by an IS member called Abu Humam, whose real name she said was Mohammed Rashid. After managing to escape from IS, she says she allegedly encountered her tormentor in Germany in 2016 and again in February this year in the southwestern German town of Schwaebisch Gmuend.

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

Hami said she reported the incidents to German police, but — citing fears for her safety — she moved back to Iraq in June.

— AP