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A Muslim couple who immigrated to Texas as “refugees” 18 years ago has been arrested and charged with holding a black girl as a house slave since she was a child, a report says.
Mohamed Toure and Denise Cros-Toure, both 57, have lived in Southlake, Texas, since the year 2000, when they came to the U.S. as “refugees” from the Republic of Guinea.
The Republic of Guinea is 85 percent Muslim and the Toures were once a part of the ruling elites of the nation. Apparently, Mohamed Toure is the son of Guinea’s first president.
But, prosecutors say that the pair imported a young Guinea girl into the U.S. when she was only a child — perhaps as young as five — and have treated her like a slave ever since 2003.
According to the New York Post:
A Texas couple accused of forcing an African girl to work as a domestic slave for 16 years — allegedly while calling her a whore and “a little nothing” — were indicted Wednesday on a litany of federal charges, including forced labor.
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.