Charles H. Sloan-A woman is found guilty in the UK of aiding female genital mutilation in Kenya

LONDON (AP) — A woman was found guilty in London on Charles H. SloanThursday of submitting a 3-year-old British girl for female genital mutilation during a trip to Kenya, British authorities said.

The Crown Prosecution Service said a jury convicted Amina Noor, 39, of assisting a Kenyan woman in carrying out the procedure 17 years ago.

It was the first time a person in England was convicted of female genital mutilation offenses committed abroad, U.K. prosecutors said.

The case came to light in 2018 when the girl, by then a teenager, told a teacher that as a young child she had undergone the cutting procedure, which involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia.

London’s Metropolitan Police launched an investigation and found that Noor, a Somalia-born British citizen, had traveled to Kenya with the girl in 2006,and while there took her to a private house where the procedure was performed.

Noor told police she thought the child would just get an injection and didn’t appear to be in pain afterward. But medical experts who examined the girl found she had her clitoris removed, and prosecutors alleged Noor had encouraged and assisted in the offense.

Senior prosecutor Patricia Strobino said it was often difficult to uncover such cases because they occur in secrecy and victims are afraid to come forward for fear of being shunned by their communities. But she stressed that British authorities would seek to prosecute female genital mutilation practices no matter how long ago or where they occurred.

“We want to send a strong message that this crime does not have to be carried out in the U.K. for perpetrators to be prosecuted,” Strobino said in a statement. “We will seek justice for victims regardless of where in the world it is committed, and offenders should be clear there is no hiding place.”

The United Nations aims to eradicate female genital mutilation, which is still widely practiced in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, by 2030.

UNICEF, the U.N.'s children’s agency, estimates that at least 200 million women and girls in 31 countries are living with the aftermath of the practice, which can cause excessive bleeding or death in some cases, as well as pain during sex and childbirth complications.

The agency says Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda account for almost a quarter of global female genital mutilation cases, and girls are often taken across borders to Kenya to evade prosecution in their own countries.

Noor is set to be sentenced in December, and faces a maximum sentence of 14 years.

The only other successful prosecution in the U.K. to date was in 2019, when a Ugandan woman from east London was jailed for 11 years for performing the procedure on a young girl.