Woman who planned to send her sons to fight in Syria sent to prison

A woman who planned to send her 16-year-old twin sons to fight for a jihadist group in Syria was sent to prison on Wednesday.

The woman, who has yet to be named and who was arrested along with her husband and the two boys on Tuesday, was sent into unconditional preventive custody by Judge Pablo Ruz of the Spanish National Court, while her husband was allowed to remain in liberty, although he is cited to report to the court every week and has had his passport confiscated.

The couple, who are of Moroccan origin, were arrested in the town of Badalona, just north of Barcelona on Tuesday, as the two boys were preparing to travel to Syria.

The Spanish Interior Ministry confirmed this journey was taking place "with" the full knowledge of those closest to them."

Judge Ruz decided that the woman who was arrested was the person responsible for organizing the journey, which would have taken the youngsters to Syria via Morocco and then Turkey.

The two boys meanwhile will appear before a juvenile court on Thursday and it will be the responsibility of that court to decide whether they should be put at liberty or kept in a juvenile detention center.

Spanish authorities informed on Tuesday that the twins only recently returned to Spain after six months studying the Koran in an Islamic religious school in the Moroccan city of Tetuan, while in 2014 another of the woman's children had died in Syria fighting for the radical Harakat Sham al Islam group.

Speaking on Spanish television several of the family's neighbors commented on how the 16-year-olds had changed since returning from Morocco, saying they had become withdrawn and uncommunicative, when previously they had behaved like most other teenagers in the neighborhood. Endit