MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian woman was charged Thursday with traveling to Syria and joining the Islamic State group, police said.
The 34-year-old woman was arrested at her Melbourne home eight months after she returned to Australia via Lebanon with another woman, Australia Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Hilda Sirec said.
The arrest came two days after seven women and 12 children linked to IS returned to Australia from a Syrian refugee camp against the wishes of the Australian government.
Three weeks ago, four women and nine children in similar circumstances returned from the same Roj camp for displaced people, which is located near the area where the frontiers of Syria, Turkey and Iraq converge.
Three of the four women were charged on arrival with slavery and terrorism offenses and remain in custody.
All the women who returned from Syria this month remained under police investigation. Another woman, who accompanied the woman charged Thursday to Australia from Lebanon, also was under investigation, Sirec said.
A period of time passing without charges does indicate investigations have ceased, Sirec noted.
The woman most recently arrested in Melbourne was expected to appear Thursday in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on a charge of entering and remaining in a declared conflict zone. She also has been charged with joining a terrorist organization, IS. Each charge carries a potential maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Police allege she traveled to Syria between 2013 and 2014 to join IS. She was captured by Kurdish forces in March 2019 after IS fighters were defeated and placed in al-Hol camp for displaced people.
She returned to Australia on Sept. 26, police allege.
Janai Safar, 32, of Sydney was charged with similar offenses when she arrived in Australia with her 9-year-old son on May 7. She must spend at least two months in a Sydney prison after a magistrate refused her application to be released on bail.
Police allege she followed her IS-fighter partner to Syria in 2015 and had a child there. The partner reportedly died in 2017. Australia made it illegal for its citizens to travel to the former Syrian IS stronghold of Raqqa without a legitimate reason from 2014 to 2017.
Kawsar Ahmed, also known as Kawsar Abbas, and her daughter Zeinab Ahmed, 31, were charged in a Melbourne court on May 8 in relation to allegations that their family bought a female Yazidi slave for $10,000 in Syria, police said.
The daughter is scheduled to apply for bail next week and the mother has a bail hearing scheduled for June 16.
FILE - Unidentified women walk between tents in a section of the camp housing Australian family members of suspected Islamic State militants in the Roj Camp in eastern Syria, Feb. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad, File)
FILE - Unidentified women walk between tents in a section of the camp housing Australian family members of suspected Islamic State militants in the Roj Camp in eastern Syria, Feb. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad, File)
MALABO, Equatorial Guinea (AP) — At first glance, the hotel looks like any other on this tropical island off the Central African coast, with its palm tree-lined driveway, marble-floored foyer and portrait of the oil-rich country’s president hanging behind a mahogany reception desk.
Yet the eerily empty Bamy Hotel is not a refuge for adventure-seeking tourists or international business travelers these days. Since late last year, only a small number of people have been staying there, and they aren't on vacation. They are being held against their will.
Under an opaque $7.5 million deal with the Trump administration, Equatorial Guinea's all-powerful president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has turned this hotel owned by his family into a prison for asylum seekers deported from the United States.
The hotel is just a way station, though. Of the at least 32 people imprisoned there since November — all of whom had previously been granted protection from U.S. judges, their lawyers said — 25 have been forced to go back to home countries across Africa where their lives might be in danger. The rest face pressure from authorities to leave.
“Government people would come all the time and say: Where is your passport? You need to go back to your own country,” said a 26-year-old man from an East African country imprisoned at the hotel. Out of fear of retaliation, he spoke on condition of anonymity, as did two other deportees interviewed by The Associated Press.
The Trump administration uses deportations to third countries as a legal loophole, immigration lawyers say, to indirectly force asylum seekers back to their home countries.
Because Equatorial Guinea is run by an authoritarian government — as are some other countries that have signed similar deals — it is difficult for foreign journalists to visit and report directly on conditions there. AP traveled to the island of Bioko as part of a recent visit by the first American pope, and is the only international news organization to visit the hotel detaining migrants.
Trapped for now in a country many had never heard of before arriving, men and women from Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Mauritania wander the hotel’s long corridors and gaze out the windows at the shimmering pool they are not allowed to use.
They haven’t faced any physical abuse, but they feel intense psychological pressure knowing they are likely headed back to home countries they fear.
“I am scared and depressed,” said the East African man.
Because of his ethnicity and the fact he fled his home country, he said he would be imprisoned or killed if forced to return. All of the asylum seekers at the hotel face a high risk of persecution back home, human rights experts say.
Under a series of murky and often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, advocates say, all part of the broad U.S. crackdown on immigration. The countries with agreements are mostly in the developing world, according to the group Third Country Deportation Watch, including roughly a dozen in Africa. Experts say countries accepting the deportees may be doing so to earn goodwill in negotiations with the U.S. over trade, migration or aid.
The Trump administration declined to comment on the details of its deal with Equatorial Guinea. A State Department spokesperson said, “we remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration.”
The Obiang administration did not respond to a request seeking comment.
As the man from East Africa at the Bamy Hotel recounted his journey, a government minder who spoke little English sat nearby, scrolling on his phone in an otherwise empty conference room.
After traveling from Africa to Brazil, the man said, he arrived in August 2024 at the U.S. border, where he was detained. He then was shuffled between immigration centers in California, Arizona and Louisiana — before landing in Equatorial Guinea almost six months ago.
The deportees' daily routines at the hotel are mundane, though the setting makes it all seem surreal, he said.
They sleep in fancy rooms that rarely get cleaned, he said, and they are served rice and meat at white cloth tables set up inside the hotel's restaurant. After being sickened by the food several times, the East African man said he eats the bare minimum.
A local lawyer brings new toothbrushes, cellphone SIM cards, and, for women, sanitary products.
Medical care has been uneven. The East African man was driven to the hospital right away after complaining of an eye problem. But when he came down with malaria and typhoid, he was not taken to a hospital until his condition had greatly deteriorated, requiring an IV. Other detainees have had similar experiences, he said.
Recently, the East African man complained to a police officer about his situation. The officer responded by saying his problems would go away if he went to the hotel’s fourth floor and jumped out the window.
“What can I do now? It’s become worse,” he said, his frail body shaking. “I started losing my mind.”
Equatorial Guinea is one of the richest countries in Africa thanks to its oil resources. It is also rife with corruption and human rights abuses, according to U.S. officials.
A former Spanish colony, the country fell into economic despair after gaining independence in 1968. Its fate shifted in the 1990s when U.S. companies started drilling for oil along its vast coastline. The subsequent boom transformed the economy, yet over half the population still lives in poverty.
The country's oil-fueled wealth has been largely pocketed by Obiang and his family, according to rights groups. Obiang’s 57-year-old son and heir apparent, Teodoro “Teodorin” Obiang Nguema, chronicles his lavish lifestyle on TikTok — soaking in infinity pools, feasting on lobster, traveling on private jets — even as citizens of Equatorial Guinea are banned from the platform.
The younger Obiang, who serves as vice president, has faced international sanctions because of corruption across his father’s administration. But the U.S. lifted sanctions, allowing the younger Obiang to travel to a high-level U.N. meeting in New York last September, just weeks before the deportations to Equatorial Guinea began.
There are virtually no critical voices in Equatorial Guinea, where the government has been accused by rights groups and the U.S. State Department of detaining, torturing and even killing those that dare to speak out.
Despite that, its largest foreign investors are U.S. businesses, and its military receives funding for training from the U.S. government.
The deportees still at the Bamy Hotel know they can be sent home any day.
Representatives of the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration, and its refugee agency, visited the hotel in November, and promised the deportees they would come back. They never did.
The East African man is the only one among them that has been allowed to see a lawyer, though it's not clear why.
While Equatorial Guinea has no asylum policy, his lawyer made a formal request with the prime minister's office — a long shot worth taking if there was any chance of being released from the hotel.
He was told to plead for mercy with the country's vice president, but his asylum claim was rejected.
The next morning, authorities deported five other people, leaving him anguished as he awaits his fate. He was told he would be next.
Associated Press writer Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.
A view of Bamy Hotel where migrants are held in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, Wednesday, May 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Monika Pronczuk)
A drilling rig in Luba, Equatorial Guinea, Saturday, April 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
Front row, from left, Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, first lady Constancia Mangue Nsue Okomo, and Equatorial Guinea Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang attend a Holy Mass with Pope Leo XIV at the Malabo Stadium in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, Thursday, April 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
Framed portraits of Equatorial Guinea President, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, displayed in an office setting in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, Friday, April 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
A street scene in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, Saturday, April 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
