Posted on September 21, 2018

Couple Indicted on Charges They Enslaved African Girl for 16 Years

Joshua Rhett Miller, New York Post, September 20, 2018

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Mohamed Toure and Denise Cros-Toure, both 57, of Southlake, were also indicted by a jury on charges of alien harboring for financial gain and conspiracies to commit forced labor and alien harboring, Justice Department officials announced.

The couple was charged in August after arranging for the girl — who didn’t speak English — to travel alone from her village in the Republic of Guinea to their home in January 2000. Toure, the son of Guinea’s first president, along with his wife, then forced the girl to work as the family’s domestic slave, including cooking, cleaning and performing yard work, federal prosecutors allege.

The girl — whose travel documents indicated she was as young as 5 or as old as 13 at the time — was also denied access to schooling, medical care and other opportunities and services that the couple provided to their own five biological children. The Toures also denied paying the girl for her work and occasionally physically abused her, prosecutors claim.

The girl told authorities she slept for years on a bedroom floor and didn’t even know how old she was because the family never celebrated her birthday, according to a criminal complaint obtained by the Dallas Morning News.

The Toures emotionally abused the girl as well, calling her “a little nothing,” a slave and — during one recorded conversation — a whore. The girl managed to escape the home in August 2016 with the help of several former neighbors.

{snip} The Toures, who were granted asylum in the United States in 2000, treated the girl like one of their own children, even giving her money for Christmas gifts and letting her stay in touch with her relatives back home, said attorney, Scott Palmer.

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If convicted of forced labor, the Toures each face up to 20 years in prison.