Born: 2000;

Place of Birth: Germany;

Gender: Female;

Nationality: German;

General Info:
Leonora Messing is a German member of Islamic State who travelled to Syria as a 15-year-old girl to join the terrorist group.

As a teenager she left her home in March 2015 and upon reaching Raqqa, Syria, became the third wife of a German citizen. Leonora and her husband allegedly enslaved a Yazidi woman in 2015.

Her father received a message from his daughter less than a week after she disappeared saying she had joined the Islamic State and “arrived in the caliphate”.

Without her family’s knowledge, Leonora had been attending a Frankfurt mosque that Germany’s intelligence service were watching.

She gave birth to two children in Islamic State-controlled territory and would eventually be detained in a Kurdish-controlled camp in northern Syria.

In December 2020, she was repatriated in one of four operations to take 54 people, most of them children, back to Germany.

Arrested upon her arrival at Frankfurt airport, Leonora was later released.

Prosecutors say she took part in human trafficking, after her husband bought and then sold the 33-year-old Yazidi woman.

She also faces charges of membership of a terrorist group and weapons law offences in a trial expected to go on until at least May.