MADRID, Jan 12 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Two Spanish women who married Daesh fighters were remanded in custody Wednesday on terror-related charges by a Madrid court after being flown home from Syrian detention camps with 13 children, legal sources said.
They arrived at Torrejon de Ardoz military airbase near Madrid late Monday nearly two months after the Spanish government agreed to fly them home from the notorious Roj detention camp in Kurdish-controlled north-eastern Syria.
Yolanda Martinez Cobos and Luna Fernandez Grande were detained on arrival and brought before a judge at the Audiencia National, Spain’s top criminal court, on Wednesday.
After hearing their statements, the judge ordered that they be held in pre-trial detention without bail on charges of “joining a terror organisation”.
It was not immediately clear whether the judge agreed to the prosecution’s request to suspend their parental rights.
Since their arrival, the children have been under the care of Madrid’s regional social services, the foreign ministry said.
El Pais newspaper said Martinez was 37 and had four children, while Fernandez, 34, has five but was looking after four other orphaned children who had grandparents in Madrid and were also flown back with the families.
El Mundo said Martinez’s husband was currently jailed in Syria while Fernandez was widowed.
The United Nations welcomed their repatriation from Roj camp, a spokesman describing conditions in the Syrian detention camps as “almost inhuman and extremely challenging”.
The foreign ministry said the extradition had taken “several months” because of the “complexity (of the operation) and due to the high-risk situation in the Syrian camps”.
Over the past decade, thousands of extremists in Europe travelled to Syria to become fighters with the Daesh group. They often took their wives and children to live in the “caliphate” it set up in territory seized in Iraq and Syria.
Since the so-called “caliphate” fell in 2019, the return of family members of fighters who were either captured or killed has been a thorny issue for European countries.
Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands have also repatriated relatives of jihadist fighters. — NNN-AGENCIES
