Supreme Court: Dibdiakova, Charged with Terrorism, Receives Suspended Sentence

Bratislava, 6 May (TASR) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday found Slovak national Renata Dibdiakova guilty of endangering the moral education of youth by complicity and imposed a two-year suspended sentence with a three-year probation period, TASR reported on Wednesday. The court dismissed appeals from both the prosecutor and the defendant. Its verdict is final. "The evidence revealed that, as the mother of her child Omar, she allowed her husband to raise their son in the spirit of such an ideology, but there is a fundamental difference between 'raising' and 'allowing to raise'," stated the court. The fact that she allowed her husband to do so without her intervention may raise questions of morality, ethics and religion, but it does not legally correspond to supporting a terrorist group, according to the Supreme Court. Dibdiakova was originally charged with particularly serious crimes of setting up, masterminding and supporting a terrorist group, wartime injustice and the offence of endangering the moral education of youth. According to the indictment, Dibdiakova and her husband allegedly raised their two children in the ideology of radical Islam after she travelled to Syria at the turn of 2014 and 2015 to join her husband, a doctor and fighter in the service of Islamic State. In February 2023, she and her children were transported to Slovakia from Iraq by a repatriation flight on a government plane. Dibdiakova was immediately detained and put in custody. She insisted on her innocence, claiming that the indictment was unfounded. In December of the same year, the Specialised Criminal Court gave her a two-year suspended sentence with a three-year probation period solely for endangering the moral education of youth. The prosecutor appealed against its verdict, disagreeing with the legal qualification of the crimes as well as the sentence imposed. jrg/mcs