WASHINGTON (AP) – The wife of a former senior leader of the Islamic State has been charged in federal court with contributing to the death of American hostage Kayla Mueller.
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In an affidavit released on Monday, FBI special agent William Heaney charged 25-year-old Nisreen Assad Ibrahim Bahar, also known as Umm Sayyaf, with conspiring to provide material support to Islamic State – an offense that officials allege resulted in Mueller’s death in February 2014.
Abu Sayyaf was killed in a Delta Force raid of his Syrian compound in June, and his wife was turned over to Iraqi authorities for prosecution.
Mueller, from Prescott, Arizona, was taken hostage with her boyfriend, Omar Alkhani, in August 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria, where he had been hired to fix the Internet service for the hospital.
Mueller was killed in February 2015. On those occasions, she acknowledged hosting Islamic State members and al-Baghdadi at her home. Justice Department officials and federal prosecutors had been debating charges in the case for months.
Before her death a year ago, Mueller was repeatedly raped and tortured, according to counter-terrorism officials.
President Barack Obama previously said that Mueller, who was an aid worker who assisted humanitarian organizations working with Syrian refugees, “epitomized all that is good in our world”.
Umm and Abu Sayyaf forcibly held Mueller and other female captives in several of their residences after the American was captured in northern Syria in 2013, according to the indictment.
Mueller was held captive with, but at times segregated from, a group of American, British and European hostages held at an old oil refinery site south of ISIS’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria. In the Fall of 2014, she was personally selected by ISIS “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to be his personal hostage against her will, family and counter-terrorism sources have said.
Rob Schumacher/AP Carl, left, and Marsha Mueller hold candles at a memorial in honor of their daughter Kayla Mueller on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015, in Prescott, Ariz.
But the ISIS widow, known as Umm Sayyaf, is unlikely ever to see the inside of a USA courtroom as she is already in custody in Iraq.
Monday’s charges “reflect that the US justice system remains a powerful tool to bring to bear against those who harm our citizens overseas”, Carlin said in the statement.
US intelligence watched the house for any signs of Mueller, Sayyaf, her husband or Baghdadi.
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USA intelligence later learned Mueller was taken to another location, where she lived with Sayyaf and her husband along with a pair of Yazidi women who later escaped in October 2014.
