This is an unprecedented trial which opens this Tuesday, May 21 before the Paris Assize Court, the first in France targeting the crimes of the Syrian regime. Three senior officials of Bashar al-Assad’s regime are being tried in their absence for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes, against two Franco-Syrian nationals.
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On November 3, 2013, around midnight, Patrick Dabbagh, a 20-year-old Franco-Syrian student, was arrested at his home on the outskirts of Damascus and taken away by men claiming to belong to the air force intelligence services.
The next day, his father Mazzen, 54, an education advisor at the French high school, suffered the same fate. No one will see them again. At the beginning of 2018, the family will receive death notices: Patrick would have died around three months after his arrest and Mazzen at the end of 2017.
According to testimonies, father and son were taken to the Mezzeh airport detention center, where the mortality rate is one of the highest of detention centers in Syria, according to the UN.
This structure is run by Air Force Intelligence, to which the accused, Generals Ali Mamlouk and Jamal Hassan, and Brigadier General Abdel Salam Mahmoud belong.
These three senior officials are being prosecuted for complicity in crimes against humanity, for their alleged involvement in the forced disappearance, imprisonment, torture and assassination of Patrick and Mazzen Dabbagh, but also for complicity in war crimes, because the Dabbagh family’s assets were confiscated by the regime.
The Syrian NGO SCM is among the civil parties, alongside the Dabbagh family. Its president Mazen Darwish was himself detained and tortured at Mezzeh airport. It was a crucial trial, he said, in which he had to testify.
“ This trial is very important in my opinion, because beyond the personal stories and the NGO reports, we will have a decision by independent judges to establish what happened in Syria. Because we fear that the regime in place and the various warlords will impose their version of the facts, their own narrative », he explains at the microphone of RFI.
These are painful memories to recall, but it is my duty to speak up for the victims.
Mazen Darwish, president of the Syrian NGO SCM
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