Reporter ‘killed by Assad regime’
UNITED STATES: Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin was killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in a targeted operation to silence journalists, according to testimony from a Syrian intelligence defector.
Senior regime officials threw a party to celebrate the success of the mission, at which an officer declared ‘‘Marie Colvin was a dog and now she’s dead’’, the defector claims.
Detailed new evidence of the regime’s involvement in Colvin’s death in the city of Homs in February 2012 has been presented to the US district court in Washington. Her sister, Cathleen Colvin, is leading a legal attempt to hold the Syrian government liable for her killing under US law. She is requesting ‘‘compensatory and punitive’’ damages that could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.
‘‘The evidence establishes that Marie was tracked down and targeted by agents of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as part of a strategy to surveil, capture and even kill journalists to prevent reporting on the regime’s crackdown on political opposition,’’ the papers lodged by her legal team state.
‘‘This deliberate, malicious conduct by the regime was undertaken in blatant violation of the established rules of international law, and constitutes an extrajudicial killing.’’
Central to the case is evidence from a former Syrian intelligence agent who fled to Europe and now lives in hiding. The defector, who is referred to as Ulysses to mask his true identity, claims that the regime established Colvin’s location through a female informant and by intercepting the correspondent’s satellite broadcasts.
Colvin, 56, a US citizen who spent 25 years reporting for The Sunday Times, was killed along with French photographer Remi Ochlik in a rocket attack on the Baba Amr Media Centre, a makeshift studio at a secret location in Homs. She had entered Syria with British photographer Paul Conroy to report on the bloody siege of the opposition-held city. Conroy was injured in the attack.
Testimony from Ulysses alleges that senior figures in the Assad regime devised a plan to intercept the journalists’ communications, locate the media centre and capture or kill foreign reporters. Intelligence officers were instructed to take ‘‘all necessary measures’’ to silence the journalists, the defector alleges.
Documents presented to the court suggest that Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother, was aware of the operation. Other alleged conspirators include Khaled al-Fares, who is claimed to be notorious drug trafficker with a network of informants in Homs. Al-Fares was given a car by Maher al-Assad as a reward, it is claimed.
More than 200 journalists have been killed in Syria since March 2011. Colvin, who lost an eye covering the conflict in Sri Lanka in 2001, was described as the greatest war correspondent of her generation. – The Times