Nils D. from Dinslaken, who has already been convicted as an IS terrorist, is to be put behind bars for life for murder. In addition, the representative of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office demanded on Friday at the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court that the particular seriousness of his guilt be established. “He tortured regularly and systematically, that is what the taking of evidence has shown,” said the prosecution representative. One prisoner tortured by him had died in the process.
Under the alias Abu Ibrahim al-Almani (“Ibrahim the German”), the accused “had a terrible reputation among the prisoners”. They had even taken him for an IS executioner. The 31-year-old had already been sentenced to four and a half years in prison as an IS terrorist in March 2016. He belonged to the notorious “Lohberg Brigade” of Salafists from the coal-mining district of Dinslaken-Lohberg, who joined the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria.
In his first trial, D. had successfully presented himself as the one who merely guarded a notorious IS torture prison against attacks from outside and had not committed any atrocities himself. Then more and more former prisoners emerged who testified that he had been in and out of the prison as a torturer.
The IS had distinguished itself through “hardly imaginable cruelty”. “People were put to death in the most deterringly cruel way possible and the corpses were put on display as a deterrent,” the senior prosecutor said. “These were not excesses of individual psychopaths, but deliberate strategy: a threat to all humanity.”
One photo from Syria showed the accused with the proud mien of a man “who belongs to the new masters”. Another photo presented the German with a prisoner with a jacket over his head and a firearm pressed into his neck.
Because torture is forbidden in Islam, the torture prison was taboo even for IS members. The statement that he had been able to move around there as a spectator was therefore completely absurd. “Such a group of torturers cannot afford to have uninvolved witnesses,” the prosecutor said.
During the torture in Manbij prison, prisoners were allegedly hung from the ceiling with their hands tied and beaten all over their bodies with a wooden stick. Prisoners who were next in line were forced to watch. According to witnesses, up to 50 prisoners were crammed into one cell.
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