Mejri ran a snack bar in France before leaving the country in 2014 to move to a part of Syria in the territory of the pseudo-caliphate of the Islamic State group, Le Monde reports. Here, she married Abdelnasser Benyoucef, a Franco-Algerian man who was considered a key member of the external operations cell of the Islamic State group.
Benyoucef, who is presumed to have died in combat in 2016, has already been convicted in absentia in France for having ordered the failed attack against the church in Villejuif, on the outskirts of Paris, in 2015, Le Monde reports. He was also charged with genocide Tuesday.
According to a judge, the Yazidi woman, now 25, had been “kidnapped, humiliated and raped by several jihadists for six years” including Benyoucef who then sold her to another “torturer” and senior leader of the Islamic State group, French media BFMTV reports.