A mother of three financed her life in the caliphate in Syria for years with Austrian welfare payments and thus scammed a total of 17,000 euros. Now a panel of lay judges handed down a lenient sentence to the 28-year-old Viennese woman, who was charged with financing terrorism and aggravated fraud and now lives in a Catholic hostel.
A 28-year-old Viennese woman who had lived for years with the jihadist-Salafist Al-Nusra Front in Syria and financed her family life with terrorists by continuing to receive Austrian social assistance was held responsible at the Regional Criminal Court on Tuesday. The confessed defendant was found guilty of terrorist association, terrorist financing, criminal organisation and aggravated commercial fraud.
In February 2017, the woman and her then partner, whom she had married according to Islamic law, had decided to go to Syria with their four-year-old daughter, where they wanted to join the Al-Nusra Front (now Jabhat Fath ash-Sham). She had wanted to “live according to the rules of the caliphate”, as she now confessed in court. Once in Syria, her husband was trained as a fighter, while she stayed at home with their four-year-old daughter.
One day, however, a former wife of her husband turned up, whereupon he returned to Europe with her. The Viennese woman, who, according to the indictment, had further internalised her radical Islamist ideas, stayed in Syria and, through the mediation of his mother, got together with a local man working for Al-Nusra. “She made herself available as a bride,” the prosecutor summarised.
The accused had her new life financed by the Austrian state. With the exception of another ex-boyfriend, nobody knew that she had gone to Syria. Before her departure, she had given her flat keys and all documents, including her bank details, to this ex-boyfriend, whom she apparently continued to trust very much. This helper subsequently collected the Viennese woman’s monthly social benefits – including maternity leave and minimum income – and transferred a total of 17,000 euros to Syria with the help of a money transfer service provider. It was not until 2019 that one of the woman’s sisters learned of her true whereabouts. The sister immediately informed the authorities, whereupon the social benefits were suspended.
The end of the money flow and the fact that the fighting in the Syrian civil war had approached dangerously close to her village prompted the woman to flee to Turkey in November 2020. There she was arrested and placed in detention pending deportation for six months. In 2021, she was extradited to Austria and held in pre-trial detention in Vienna for a short time. In the meantime, the mother of three – she is now also the mother of an eleven-month-old boy – lives with her two youngest children in a residential home of a Catholic women’s order and is cared for by the probation service and the Derad deradicalisation association.
The jury was lenient in its sentencing. The woman, who was previously blameless, got off with two years, eight months in prison without parole. The penalty range would have allowed up to ten years imprisonment. After consultation with her defence lawyer Harald Schuster, the woman accepted the sentence, which is not legally binding.
The co-defendant’s ex-boyfriend, an employee of the Austrian Federal Railways, who had transferred the money to the defendant, was sentenced to one year conditional for financing terrorism. The man with whom the accused had originally left for Syria was serving a three-and-a-half-year unconditional prison sentence in Stein Prison until recently. He was released a few days ago, deported to Germany as a German citizen and ordered to be banned from residing in Austria.
https://exxpress.at/acht-monate-haft-frau-finanzierte-leben-im-kalifat-mit-wiener-sozialhilfe/