Swedish woman gets 3 months in prison for “war crime” in Syria – POLITICO

The Gothenburg District Court on Wednesday sentenced a woman to three months in prison for a war crime in Raqqa in 2014, “among other things”.

The sentence is linked to the Islamic State’s placing of “mutilated bodies” in a roundabout in the center of Raqqa, a Syrian city that served as the headquarters of the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017. In a press release, the court said “the woman had twice published photographs” of impaled heads. on a fence at the roundabout.

An image shared on social media of the woman depicts a woman in front of a severed head. The court said she wrote “derogatory comments” about the people in the photos.

Nonetheless, the 35-year-old denied any wrongdoing, saying she was not pictured in the photos she posted on social media.

The court said the action described was likely to “seriously violate the personal dignity of protected persons” under Swedish law. The woman further expressed her sympathy for the acts of the terrorist group, according to the court.

She was also sentenced for “intimidation of a civil servant and aggravated defamation, directed against two social workers”.

The court explained the sentence in a written statement to POLITICO, saying “all of these crimes were committed remotely, online or over the phone”, adding that the court took into account these circumstances, as well as the “nature of each criminal”. act and the context” in which they were committed.

Iain Cameron, professor of public international law at Sweden’s Uppsala University, said the light sentence was likely because the woman had not killed or maimed the people in the photos. He added that the sentence is “presumably in line with relatively lenient Swedish sentencing practices”.