Conviction of Syrian agent in Germany ‘a ray of hope’
Germany’s foreign minister yesterday welcomed the first conviction of a Syrian intelligence agent for involvement in state-sponsored torture during the rule of Bashar Al Assad.
“This is a historic verdict,” Heiko Maas said. “It is the first verdict that holds those responsible for torture in Syria accountable and it at least creates a little justice.”
Low-ranking former intelligence official Eyad Al Gharib, 44, was convicted yesterday for complicity in crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for his role in helping to arrest at least 30 protesters in Duma in the autumn of 2011.
Campaigners said they hoped the guilty verdict would set a precedent for other trials to be held outside of Syria that would put senior regime figures in the dock.
The case against Al Gharib was heard in Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians, and their former tormenters, fled during the war.
Al Gharib went on trial last year with Anwar Raslan, a senior Syrian security official who is accused of overseeing the abuse of detainees at Al Khatib detention centre near Damascus.
The court concluded that Al Gharib’s unit, which was under Raslan’s command, was involved in chasing down and detaining at least 30 people after the demonstration in Duma, and then taking them to the detention centre, where they were tortured.
Al Gharib, who had the rank of sergeant major until he defected, left Syria in 2013 and went to Germany in 2018. Both men were arrested a year later.
Russia and China used their vetoes to block attempts by the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, forcing victims to rely for justice on criminal cases to be heard in European courts.
The conviction was hailed as a “ray of hope” by Syrian Wassim Mukdad, who was among those tortured in Al Khatib
“This is just the beginning and the day will come when Bashar Al Assad and his cronies, the army and intelligence generals are put on trial,” said Mr Mukdad, who gave evidence at the trial.
The judge found that the crimes were part of the Syrian government’s systematic abuses against its own population.
The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, which supported 29 survivors involved in the case, is working to bring further cases against other Syrian officials in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Norway.
A former Syrian intelligence official yesterday became the first person to be convicted for his part in state-sponsored torture by the government of President Bashar Al Assad.
Eyad Al Gharib was sentenced to jail for four-and-a-half years by a court in Germany, the first conviction in the world related to the repression of protesters after the Arab uprisings of 2011.
Al Gharib, 44, was found guilty of being an accomplice to crimes against humanity.
He helped to arrest at least 30 protesters after a rally in Duma and delivered them to Al Khatib detention centre in Damascus in the autumn of 2011.
Torture victim Feras Fayyad, who gave evidence, said: “I’m really happy. I can’t cry, I wish I could cry but I can’t because of the torture and the trauma.”
Al Gharib is the first of two men on trial since April 23 to be sentenced by the court in Koblenz, after judges decided to split the proceedings in two.
The second, Anwar Raslan, 58, denies charges of crimes against humanity, including overseeing the murder of 58 people and torture of 4,000.
He was arrested after being spotted in a shop in Germany by Anwar Al Bunni, a lawyer who spent five years in one of Syria’s notorious jails. The lawyer said that Wednesday’s conviction of Al Gharib was a landmark moment.
“This is not about one person,” he said. “He belonged to a systematic policy from this evil machine that was involved in disappearances, torture, killed people and hid their bodies.
“His crimes followed orders from high-ranking officers. When they charged him, they charged all of this group.
“We are asking Europe to ban these criminals from being part of our future in Syria and the future of humanity.”
The two men were being tried on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows a foreign country to prosecute crimes against humanity, regardless of where they were committed.
Al Gharib defected in 2012. After spending time in Turkey and Greece, he arrived in Germany on April 25, 2018.
The account he gave German authorities in charge of his asylum application eventually led to his arrest in February 2019.
Prosecutors accused him of being a cog in the machine of a system where torture was practised on an “almost industrial scale”.
The court was shown pictures of the bodies of 6,786 Syrians who were starved or tortured to death in the Assad regime’s detention centres. Al Gharib’s lawyers read out a letter in which he expressed his sorrow for the victims.
With tears streaming down his face he listened to them argue that he and his family could have been killed had he not carried out his orders.
But Patrick Kroker, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said people like Al Gharib “can be very important in informing us about the Syrian officials we are really targeting, but it is something he chose not to do”.
More than a dozen witnesses told the court of the abuses they endured, some of them disguised for fear of reprisals against their relatives in Syria.