A court has convicted in absentia an Italian woman and her Albanian husband on terrorism charges for traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State group. In the first case in Italy involving foreign fighters operating inside the war zone, the court on Monday sentenced Maria Giulia Sergio to nine years in prison and her husband, Aldo Kobuzi, to 10 years. They are believed to be in Syria. Members of Sergio's family, who also were planning to join her in Syria, also were convicted. They included her father, who was convicted of a lesser charge of organizing the journey of jihadists and sentenced to four years in jail. He was arrested in mid-2015, six months after his daughter and son-in-law had departed for Syria. Her father Sergio Sergio was sentenced to four years in jail and her husband, Albanian national Aldo Kobuzi, to 10 years in jail by the same court. Sergio's sister was tried separately and sentenced to five years four months in prison. The family, all of whom were converts to Islam, were arrested in July 2015 when prosecutors said they and seven other suspects had joined ISIS and were on the verge of leaving to fight in Syria. The mother, Assunta Buonfiglio, died of cardiac arrest aged 60 in October 2015, on the eve of her release into house arrest. Monday's sentence was the first in Italy to be handed down against a foreign fighter still in the combat zone.
