Germany arrests a Syrian man accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes including torture and enslavement. #Syria https://t.co/Un8bP2pcW2
— NORTH PRESS AGENCY - ENGLISH (@NPA_English) August 4, 2023
German authorities arrested on Thursday a Syrian man in charge of Tadamon massacre in Damascus, Syria’s capital, in 2013.
The man, called Ahmad H, is accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes including torture and enslavement, German prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday.
Ahmad was leading a pro-government militia in Tadamon, when the massacre took place in 2013 that resulted in the killing of about 40 people. The massacre was filmed by its perpetrators and revealed by The Guardian last year.
In April 2022, The Guardian published a report that showed members of the Syrian Military Intelligence Branch 227 were shown firing at blindfolded, unarmed civilians in Tadamon, a residential neighborhood in the Syrian capital of Damascus. The video showed 41 people being murdered by an intelligence officer called Amjad Yusef.
In March, the US Department of State issued a decision in which it barred Yusef from entering US territory. The decision barred Yusef, his wife, and close family members from entering US territory. "Yusef’s war crimes serves as a sobering reminder for why countries should not normalize relations with the Assad regime absent enduring progress towards a political resolution," said Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, in an accompanying statement.
The suspect, Ahmad H, is the first person to be detained in connection with crimes in Tadamon, The Guardian reported. "He was a local leader of the Shabiha, a pro-regime paramilitary group tasked with suppressing political opponents. The group is accused of regularly detaining civilians at checkpoints in Tadamon, whom they tortured, extorted or forced into labour, prosecutors said."
According to the British newspaper, 27 extremely graphic videos of Shabiha and Syrian soldiers carrying out massacres and disposing of dozens bodies in the neighbourhood were leaked from a Syrian government laptop to two academics based in Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...in 2019.
The academics are Prof. Ugur Üngör, from the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and the researcher Annsar Shahoud identified many of the perpetrators in the videos, including Amjad Yusef.
Ahmad H, understood by The Guardian to be an associate of Yusuf, is accused of "personally participating in the abuse of civilians in various occasions", the prosecutors said.
With the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled their country to Germany. Among the refugees, there were several pro-government officers and leaders.
Last year, Germany sentenced Anwar Raslan, ex-colonel of the Syrian Intelligence, to life in prison for crimes against humanity for his part in murdering 58 detainees, raping others, and torturing about 4,000 prisoners.
Also, Alaa Mousa, a doctor who worked at a military intelligence prison in the Syrian city of Homs from April 2011 until late 2012, was accused of torturing and killing inmates at a government-run prison and two military hospitals, German prosecutors said last year. He is accused of killing one person and 18 counts of torture, as well as causing serious physical and psychological harm to others. The doctor has been in pretrial detention in Germany since his arrest in June 2020.
| Deutsche Welle adds: |
The suspect, identified only as Ahmad H., was arrested in Bremen on Wednesday, prosecutors said a day later.
Prosecutors said the suspect was the leader of a militia loyal to Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad in the Damascus suburb of Tadamon from 2012 to 2015. They said the militia ran checkpoints where "people were arrested arbitrarily so that they or their family members could be extorted for money, committed to forced labor or tortured."
In one incident, the suspect is alleged to have hit an arrested man in the face and ordered fellow militia members to "brutally torment" him for hours with plastic pipes.
In another incident, the suspect and other militia members allegedly beat and kicked a civilian at a checkpoint, slamming the civilian's head into the pavement and then tying him up before he was taken away by the militia.
Prosecutors also pointed to two alleged incidents where the suspect is said to have arrested a group of 25-30 people and forced them to spend a day carrying sandbags to a nearby front line, where they worked under fire without food or water and were beaten.
The militia also worked with a military intelligence wing that executed at least 47 people in the area, prosecutors said.
On Thursday, a judge remanded the suspect in jug pending a possible indictment.
Although the alleged crimes against humanity were committed in Syria and no German citizens were involved, Germany's principle of "universal jurisdiction" means prosecutors can still pursue cases of serious crimes committed abroad, no matter who perpetrated them or who the victims were. In 2022, this led to the first conviction of a senior Syrian official for crimes against humanity.
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