Australian court hears bail arguments for woman accused of enslaving Yazidi teen in Syria
A lawyer has told an Australian court that a woman accused of enslaving a Yazidi teenager in Syria would agree to electronic monitoring and religious counseling if she were freed on bail
MELBOURNE, Australia -- A woman accused of enslaving a Yazidi teenager in Syria would agree to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and undergo religious counseling if she were freed on bail, her lawyer told a court Friday.
Zeinab Ahmad, 31, continued an application for bail in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on two slavery charges. Her application was heard on Thursday and Friday. It will continue on June 15 when her lawyer Grace Morgan has called a police witness to testify.
The mother of three would live with her daughter in the Melbourne home of her uncle Abraham Abbas. The mechanic told the court he hated the Islamic State group.
“They’re evil and they don’t represent anything to do with Islam at all,” Abbas said.
Ahmad and her mother Kawsar Ahmad, 53, also known as Kawsar Abbas, have been in custody on slavery charges since they returned to Australia from a Syrian refugee camp last month with a group of Australian women and children linked to IS.
A Yazidi woman has alleged she was enslaved in the Ahmad family home in 2017 and 2018 in the then-IS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria. She also alleged she was raped and beaten by the defendants’ husband and father Mohammed Ahmad, who in currently held in an Iraqi prison.
Morgan told the court her client was willing to undergo religious counseling if released through a program run by police and a board of imams that counters violent extremism.
Ahmad would also agree to be subjected to a so-called control order with conditions including wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and surveillance of her phone.
Such orders are usually imposed by courts on convicted terrorists who are reaching the end of prison terms and continue to pose an unacceptable threat to the public. The orders restrict a person’s conduct, movements and communications for a set period.
Two police officers testified Friday that such orders could not legally be used instead of or in conjunction with bail conditions.
Detective Senior Constable Marc Clendenning, who heads the investigation, told the court that electronic monitoring of Ahmad’s movements and phone would not make the risk she posed acceptable.
“There’s a lot of unknown information about the accused’s ideology,” Clendenning said.
“The fact of being under Islamic State for over a decade, no conditions of that nature would ameliorate the risk,” he added.
Three generations of the Ahmad family moved from Melbourne to Syria via Turkey in 2013 and 2014.
Morgan argued that because such slavery charges had never before been tried in Victoria state, the hearing would take longer than other criminal trials.
Detective Sgt. Matt Archer, a Joint Counter Terrorism Team supervisor, did not agree it would necessarily take longer that other prosecutions but agreed that an offense being tried for the first time brought some legal complexities.
Australian officials found the woman who alleged she was enslaved in the Kurdish-populated part of northern Iraq in 2019. The officials couldn’t electronically record an interview with her about her allegations against the Ahmad family, but she provided a typed statement, according to prosecution evidence.
Morgan questioned how defense lawyers could get all relevant evidence and documents through the Kurdistan Regional Government, which runs the semi-autonomous region of Iraq.
Ahmad is charged with two crimes against humanity: enslavement and use of a slave. Each carries a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.
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