Judgment due today in trial of Lisa Smith for alleged membership of Isis

Judgment will be given today in the trial of Lisa Smith, the first person to be prosecuted in the State on charges of membership of Isis, the Islamic State terrorist group.

The three judge non-jury Special Criminal Court, presided over by Mr Justice Tony Hunt, sitting with Judges Gerard Griffin and Cormac Dunne, will give its judgment this morning following the nine week trial.

Ms Smith (40), from Dundalk, Co Louth, who has a young daughter, has denied being a member of Isis between October 2015 and December 2019.

She also pleaded not guilty to a charge of financing terrorism by sending €800 to a named man in 2015. The prosecution claimed she intended that money to help the man, an Isis fighter, return to the battlefield.

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A former member of the Defence Forces, Ms Smith is the first person to be charged here with membership of an unlawful organisation acting outside the jurisdiction.

The prosecution contended certain online conversations in which she participated suggested she was aware of what Isis was doing before she decided to travel to Syria. Among various videos she watched online and discussed was one showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive, the trial was told.

Ms Smith told gardaí she first read the Koran in 2010 and converted to Islam a year later

The trial heard, around the time of her conversion, her long term relationship was coming to an end. Her counsel, Michael O’Higgins SC, said she was heartbroken, depressed, and “desperate to find meaning in life”.

Mr O’Higgins applied, both before the trial started last January, and again after the prosecution case closed in late March, to have the charges dismissed on grounds of alleged lack of evidence to sustain them but the court rejected both applications.

In seeking to halt the trial before it began, Mr O’Higgins argued this was the first ever prosecution mounted against an individual who had travelled to Syria to help build the Isis state but who had not carried out a terrorist act there. A whole range of professional people, including doctors and lawyers, travelled to Syria to lend their assistance within the territory controlled by Isis and none of those had been prosecuted, he said.

Sean Gillane SC, for the prosecution, submitted there was adequate evidence to support the charges.

The witnesses called during the trial included experts and a number of people who were friends of Ms Smith for a time.

Prof Hugh Kennedy, a professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and author of a book on the history of caliphates, was called as a defence witness, while Dr Florence Gaub, an expert on conflicts in the Middle East, gave evidence as a prosecution witness. Tania Joya, a former jihadist who met Ms Smith during the latter’s first visit to Syria in 2013, also gave evidence.

Ms Smith did not give evidence but a core part of her defence rested on statements made by her to gardaí. In those, she told gardaí she had not wanted to go to Syria but believed, if she did not, she would die in “the hellfire”. On October 1st, 2015, she boarded a flight to Istanbul and ultimately ended up in Syria.

While there, she met and married an English man and gave birth to their daughter in Raqqa in the summer of 2017. The family later fled across the country, staying in different locations as the forces of Syrian president Bashar-al-Assad gained ground. Her husband was killed and Ms Smith and her daughter spent time in refugee camps before she was ultimately deported back to Ireland in late 2019.