Federal prosecutors presented tearful testimony Tuesday from the mother of a sickly toddler who was whisked away from his Georgia home by relatives without her permission to a remote desert encampment in northern New Mexico where he died.
Four family members, including the boy’s aunts, are facing kidnapping or terrorism charges, or both, that stem from an August 2018 raid in search of the 3-year-old boy at a squalid encampment near the Colorado line. Authorities said they found the suspects living with 11 hungry children without running water at the encampment encircled by berms of tires with an adjacent shooting range where guns and ammunition were seized.
The badly decomposed body of Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj was eventually found in an underground tunnel at the compound.
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