Father of teenage jihadist talks of joy that she is alive and safe

Linda Wenzel was 15 when she vanished from the small German town of Pulsnitz in July last year to fight for the terror group after being groomed online by a Chechen Jihadist she is reported

to have later married. Last week she was pulled alive, wounded, dazed and dirty, from the rubble of a house in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Her construction worker father Reiner, 52, said that

he was painting lines on a busy autobahn near his home in Dresden last week when he got the news. "I collapsed when I learned that Linda lives," he told Bild. "I heard on the

radio that they had found her alive in Mosul. "My colleagues came over to me. I had to leave and go and sit at a service station where I cried. "That is my little one," he

said, holding up the photo of a confused and dazed Linda taken by one of the Iraqi troops who rescued her. "I recognised her from a little scar across one eye that she got as a child

from a garden swing. I have never seen my little one look so serious and so sad." Living apart from Linda"s mother Katharina, 48, he remembers her calling him on the night of July

3 last year asking if he knew where she was. Linda had told her and her stepfather that she was traveling to spend the weekend with a friend. But she had actually purchased a ticket for

Istanbul using her mother’s money and from there was smuggled into Syria. Reiner went on: "Later she found a copy for the airline ticked which shows she had booked a return flight for

July 3, but she never came back. They would never let her come back. "On the day she left I had been in Pulsnitz painting road markings. She must have passed me on her way to the

airport. "All the time she was gone I wished that my Linda was safe and that she would return happy and healthy to Germany. I would always be here for her." When she was gone

police opened up a probe into her activities with ISIS, suspecting her of supporting a terror organisation. If the investigation is deactivated she could face a ten-year jail term if she

returns to Germany.