This is a first: three senior officials of the Syrian regime of Bashar el-Assad will be tried in France, we learned on Tuesday, April 4. They will appear before an assize court for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes, as decided by two French investigating judges. They will be judged for the death of two Franco-Syrians.
Their names were Mazzen and Patrick Dabbagh. The first, Senior Education Advisor at the French school in Damascus, was the father of the second, a student at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences in the Syrian capital.
Both men were arrested in November 2013 by Syrian Air Force intelligence agents. Then they would have been taken to the detention and torture center from al-Mezzeh military airport. Then, no more signs of life. The regime will eventually declare them dead in the summer of 2018. Many witnesses – including several deserters from the Syrian army and former detainees from al-Mezzeh – detailed to French investigators and the NGO International Commission for the Justice and Accountability (CIJA) the torture inflicted in this prison. Furthermore, Mazzen Dabbagh’s house was confiscated and his wife and daughter were evicted from it in July 2016. Ownership of the residence “ was transferred to the Syrian Arab Republic “who rented it” to the director of intelligence services of the Air Force for the sum of approximately 30 euros per year “, according to the magistrates, who believe that these facts constitute complicity in a war crime.
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The brother and uncle of the two disappeared seized French justice. The prosecution had opened a preliminary investigation in 2015, then a judicial investigation for enforced disappearances and acts of torture constituting crimes against humanity in October 2016.
Today, therefore, three senior Syrian officials have been referred to the Paris Assize Court: Jamil Hassan, director of the Air Force’s intelligence services when the two Franco-Syrians disappeared, Abdel Salam Mahmoud, head of the investigation branch of the Air Force intelligence services, and finally Ali Mamlouk, former head of Syrian intelligence – who in 2012 became director of the National Security Office, the highest authority intelligence in the country. All three are subject to international arrest warrants. But there is little chance that they will be arrested before their trial. They will therefore be judged by default.
The Syrian regime is the target of several legal actions launched in Europe, especially in Germany.
(and with agencies)