The National Court on Monday released the Spanish women Yolanda Martínez and Luna Fernández, the two wives of jihadists repatriated in January 2023 from northern Syria with the 13 children they were caring for (nine of them their biological children). With the support of the Prosecutor’s Office, the Criminal Chamber has agreed to release them pending the trial against both of them, accused of crimes of integration into a terrorist organization for joining the Islamic State (ISIS). A date for that oral hearing has not yet been set.
After landing at the Torrejón de Ardoz military base (Madrid) with the 13 minors in January 2023, after the Spanish Government approved their repatriation following EL PAÍS’s location of them in 2019 in the Syrian camp of Al Hol, the investigating judge Santiago Pedraz agreed to send the two Spanish women to preventive detention, considering a risk of flight and repeat offences. However, almost two years later, the Criminal Chamber now concludes that these “circumstances” have changed: “There is no risk of flight at present.”
Nevertheless, the magistrates have taken away the passports of the two defendants and have prohibited them from leaving Spain. The National Court has also decreed that they must appear in court every week. The public prosecutor, who has announced that they will request six years in prison for them in the trial, has supported the release of Yolanda Martínez and Luna Fernández; but the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT), acting as a private prosecutor, has opposed it.
In 2024, Judge Pedraz agreed to prosecute the two women for having joined the jihadist organization; for having collaborated with the terrorist network in Spain before their departure to Syria; and for having left for the conflict zone in 2014 with their husbands, after the proclamation of the pseudo-caliphate of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. “The defendants always showed their willingness to be members of Daesh,” the instructor detailed in the resolution with which he proposed to put them in the dock.
As revealed by EL PAÍS, the two women had links to the Al Andalus Brigade, a jihadist cell dismantled in 2014. Martínez was married to Omar El Harchi, a Moroccan from Ceuta who had become a Spanish citizen, who has been placed in a Kurdish prison and who, according to the Court’s investigations, worked as a recruiter for Al Andalus before leaving for Syria – in addition, the agents found a letter supposedly sent by Martínez to the wife of another Islamist where he “encouraged” her to travel to that country: “In the face of the Syrian conflict, we must not remain static, but take action.” Luna Fernández, on the other hand, is the widow of Mohamed Amin El Aabou, another key piece of the “operational core” of Al Andalus. According to the agents, Fernández had a role as “leader” among the wives of the members of said group.
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