Kuwait jails Filipina for joining ISIS

KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait – A Kuwaiti court on Monday, December 26, sentenced a Filipino woman to 10 years in jail after convicting her of joining the Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS or the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) group and plotting attacks.

The ruling, which is not final, also calls for deporting the 32-year-old after serving her term.

The woman was arrested in August, two months after arriving in the oil-rich Gulf state to work as a domestic helper.

At the time, the interior ministry said she had confessed to being a member of the Islamic State group and was plotting terrorist attacks in the emirate.

The woman told interrogators that her husband was an active fighter with ISIS in Libya and he had asked her to come to Kuwait from the Philippines as a domestic helper, according to the ministry.

An ISIS-affiliated group in the Philippines has conduced a string of bombings as well as kidnappings for ransom of foreign tourists and Christian missionaries in the country.

Kuwaiti courts have sentenced to various jail terms a number of members, sympathizers and financiers of the ISIS group.

In October, Kuwait police arrested an Egyptian driver suspected of being a member of the ISIS, after he rammed a garbage truck into a pick-up carrying 5 Americans.

Authorities in July said they had dismantled 3 ISIS cells plotting attacks, including a suicide bombing against a Shiite mosque and against an interior ministry target.

An ISIS-linked suicide bomber killed 26 worshippers in June last year when he blew himself up in a mosque of Kuwait’s Shiite minority, in the worst such attack in the Gulf state’s history. – Rappler.com