Refugee says ISIS man seen in Germany

BERLIN — German prosecutors said Saturday that they are taking seriously a Yazidi refugee’s claim that she ran into her former Islamic State captor twice in Germany, but say they need more information to identify him.

The case of 19-year-old Ashwaq Haji Hami made headlines this past week after she was quoted telling the Iraqi-Kurdish news portal basnews that she returned to her homeland of Iraq for fear that her alleged tormentor could harm her in Germany. Several reports in foreign media suggested that German authorities were unwilling to act on the woman’s claims.

“The young woman was interviewed but the information [she provided] wasn’t precise enough,” Frauke Koehler, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, said on Saturday. When authorities tried to follow up, the woman had already left Germany, Koehler said.

The Associated Press spoke to the woman at a camp for displaced people near Shekhan in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

Hami said she was captured by the Islamic State extremist group in August 2014, and enslaved and abused by an Islamic State member called Abu Humam, whose real name she said was Mohammed Rashid. After managing to escape from the Islamic State, she said she encountered her tormentor in Germany in 2016 and again in February this year in the southwestern German town of Schwaebisch Gmuend.