Three executives of the Syrian intelligence services are being tried in their absence in Paris for complicity in crimes against humanity, for their alleged role in the arbitrary arrest, torture and death of a Franco-Syrian father and son. This Wednesday, May 22, the court heard the first testimony from a civilian, Majed, who survived the hell of the detention center at Mezzeh airport, where Mazzen and Patrick Dabbagh allegedly died.
2 mins
Hearing report, with Laura Martel
This trial of three dignitaries of the regime Bashar al-Assad before the Paris Assize Court, it is a bit like that of the fate shared by thousands of Syrians since the start of the civil war in their country in 2011.
Majed was a pharmacist. One day in August 2011, after he demonstrated against the Damascus regime – with a rose in his hand, he said – two armed men stopped him in his shop, blindfolded him and took him away.
In detention, he suffered insults, hunger, torture, but also electric shocks and beatings, which reduced his feet to shreds. And this 8m2 cell, where there are fourteen of them, then twenty, then thirty.
After six weeks, Majed is suddenly dressed, groomed, taken in front of an officer who announces to him, in front of a camera, that the president is pardoning him. “ Yet you don’t deserve it », Adds the officer.
This is Jamil Hassan, head of intelligence of the Syrian Air Force, one of the accused in the Paris trial. “ My experience is nothing, compared to what others have experienced », breathes Majed. “ There have been much worse. »
The worst was displayed earlier, on the screen, with the photos from the César file, exfiltrated from Syria in 2013. Corpses of civilians, young men, naked, placed on the ground. Swollen, distorted faces. Tortured, emaciated bodies.
Written on the chest, their prisoner number and that of the intelligence service which detained them; on their foreheads, a label taped, the observations of the pathologist.
These dozen shots are just the tip of the horror iceberg. The Caesar file alone contained 27,000.
To rereadTrial of Syrian dignitaries in Paris: the regime of Bashar al-Assad under the grill