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| Europe |
| Syrian doctor arrested in Germany for 'crimes against humanity': prosecutor |
| 2020-06-23 |
[PUBLISH.TWITTER]
The suspect, identified as Alaa M., is accused of having "tortured a detainee ... in at least two cases" at a prison run by Syrian intelligence services in the city of Homs in 2011, said German federal prosecutors in a statement. Alaa M. left Syria in mid-2015 and moved to Germany, where he also practised as a doctor. He was arrested in the state of Hesse on Friday and remains in pre-trial detention. Having taken in more than 700,000 Syrian refugees since the start of the conflict, Germany has become a sometimes surreal theatre where victims of torture come face to face with their erstwhile torturers. In April, the first court case worldwide over state-sponsored torture by Bashir al-Assad's regime opened in Germany -- after the suspects were brought to the notice of the authorities by their victims. The two defendants, former Syrian intelligence officers Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib, are being tried on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows a foreign country to prosecute crimes against humanity. Last week, seven Syrians who allegedly suffered or witnessed rape and sexual abuse in detention centres under Assad's government submitted a criminal complaint to prosecutors in Germany. The four women and three men were held in various detention centres in Damascus, Aleppo and Hama between April 2011 and August 2013, according to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), a Berlin-based legal group. They were all victims or witnesses of torture and sexual violence, including rape, "electrical shocks to the genitals... and forced They have named nine senior government and air force intelligence officials, including top Syrian intelligence officer Jamil Hassan, already the subject of an international arrest warrant. |
| Posted by:Fred |