Germany is the first country to prosecute a senior person responsible for the abuses of the Bashar al Ásad regime
An official of the Syrian secret services was sentenced today to life imprisonment by a German court in what is considered “the first trial in the world against a prominent member of the Bashar al-Assad regime for crimes against humanity,” according to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office. , who exercised the prosecution in the case. Anwar Raslan, 58, was found guilty by the Koblenz High Court for the murder of 27 people, as well as serious injuries to another 25, serious rapes, sexual coercion, kidnapping and hostage-taking, among other charges. The convicted person was ultimately responsible for the interrogations carried out in the Al Khatib prison of the Syrian secret services in Damascus and is held responsible for the torture of at least 4,000 prisoners between April 2011 and September 2012. The The process, which began in April 2020, has taken place over 108 sessions and has attracted international attention due to its novel nature.
In the Koblenz court, not only the facts of which Raslan was accused have been called into question, but the entire system of repression and systematic assassinations of the Syrian regime after the start of the Arab Spring. Although the accused did not commit the crimes in this country nor did they directly affect German citizens, Germany has applied since the approval in 2002 of a law by the Bundestag, the federal parliament, the universal law that allows the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by people in third countries. More than 80 people testified during the trial, including a series of victims of his torture who joined in the private prosecution. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office had requested the sentence of life imprisonment and the establishment of a particularly serious guilt, which will prevent that after 15 years of serving a sentence his release can be studied and, in extreme cases, that he will never be released. The defense had asked that he be released.
Raslan himself had pleaded not guilty and assured that he had not personally tortured anyone or given the order to do so. Moreover, he assured during the process that he had been concerned with freeing protesters who had been imprisoned during the protests against the Assad regime in the Arab Spring. The condemned man declared that he was sympathetic to the Syrian opposition at the time and that he supported that movement after escaping from his country and obtaining political asylum in Germany in 2014. Raslan even participated in the second peace conference for Syria that was held in Geneva that same year. His defense acknowledged that the accused had never denied having knowledge of the systematic torture in Al Khatib prison, but that he rejected it and even punished several of his subordinates for it. But he pointed out that “a collaborator of a criminal regime cannot simply reach for the telephone when he realizes the injustices that are committed in prison”, since that would have endangered his own family.
Recognized by refugees
After their flight to this country, Raslan and his former subordinate Eyad Alghareib were recognized and denounced by several of their alleged victims, also refugees in Germany, and detained in 2019 by the German authorities. Alghareib was already sentenced in a previous process to four and a half years in prison for collaboration in crimes against humanity after it was shown that he had helped to bring 30 protesters to the prison where Raslan tortured dissidents of the Syrian regime. During the trial, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office presented conclusive evidence of the torture that was carried out and is surely still carried out in Al Khatib prison. Among them is the collection of images of those tortured and murdered by the authorities of their country taken by the Syrian military photographer known by the pseudonym “Caesar”, who escaped from Syria with more than 50,000 photographs that were partly exhibited at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.
The trial has been closely followed by the large community of Syrian refugee citizens in Germany, which increased enormously from the summer of 2015 with the massive arrival of asylum seekers from that country via the Balkan route. “My faith in justice has been restored,” said one of the women who was part of the private prosecution, who stressed that what is decisive is the message that criminals will pay sooner or later for their faults.
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