TAOS COUNTY, N.M. — A woman charged in the death of a Georgia 3-year-old found at a New Mexico compound has signed a tentative plea agreement to weapon charges in exchange for a reduced sentence, according to the Associated Press.
Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj’s remains were found on Aug. 6, 2018 on what would have been his fourth birthday. The boy, who was from Clayton County, had previously been reported missing in November 2017.
Prosecutors charged five people in his death, including the boy’s father, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and his partner, Jany Leveille.
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Channel 2 Action News has been following this case since the child’s remains were found in 2018.
The plea agreement would ignore Leveille’s kidnapping and terrorism-related charges and allow her to accept a potential 12 to 15 year sentence and possible fines.
The child’s remains were found alongside 11 other starving children.
The surviving children told investigators about religious rituals performed on Abdul-Ghani, saying the boy would cry with his eyes rolling back into his head as “jinn” and “shayateens,” or spirits and demons, were cast out of him, sometimes for up to five hours a day.
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After the child’s death, they said regular washing of his body would be used as a “tool of punishments against one of the children, if he disobeyed the requests of the adults or showed disrespect.”
Excerpts from Leveille’s journal, obtained by Channel 2 Action News in 2018, revealed that Abdul-Ghani died on Christmas Eve when his father was trying to remove a spirit from his body. The journal says his heart stopped, started again and stopped permanently, but Leveille believed he’d be “resurrected as Jesus.”
She goes on to say in her journal that she believed the Abdul-Ghani’s birth mother, Hakima Ramzi, used black magic to steal the boy from her womb.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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