A trial that promises to be historic. Two French investigating judges ordered on Tuesday that three senior officials of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime be tried in criminal courts for the death of two French-Syrian citizens, Mazzen Dabbagh and his son Patrick, arrested in 2013, AFP learned. from a source close to the file.
judged by default
In their indictment, known to AFP, the magistrates requested a trial for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes against Ali Mamlouk, Jamil Hassan and Abdel Salam Mahmoud.
Ali Mamlouk is the former Syrian intelligence chief who became director of the National Security Office in 2012, Syria’s highest intelligence body.
Jamil Hassan était pour sa part directeur des services de l’armée de l’Armée de l’Air syrienne lors de la disparition des deux Franco-Syriens, tandis qu’Abdel Salam Mahmoud était directeur de la branche investigation du service de l’armée from air.
Defendants, subject to international arrest warrants, must be tried in absentia.
“This decision opens the way, for the first time in France, to the trial of high-ranking officials of the Syrian repressive apparatus,” the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Syrian Center for the media, welcomed in a press release. (SCM) and the League for Human Rights (LDH), civil parties in the case.
Case opened in 2015
The prosecution had opened a preliminary investigation in 2015, then a judicial investigation for forced disappearances and acts of torture constituting crimes against humanity had been opened in October 2016, following a complaint made by the brother and uncle of the disappeared person, Obeïda Dabbagh .
The two French-Syrians, a student at the Faculty of Letters and Humanistic Sciences of Damascus born in 1993 for the first and main education adviser at the French School of Damascus born in 1956 for the second, were arrested in November 2013 by agents who claimed to belong to the intelligence services of the Syrian Air Force.
According to Mazzen Dabbagh’s brother-in-law, arrested at the same time as him but released two days later, the two men were transferred to al-Mezzeh prison, denounced as a torture center for the regime.
They then gave no sign of life until they were declared dead by the regime in August 2018. According to the death certificates, Patrick died on January 21, 2014 and Mazzen on November 25, 2017.
Source: BFM TV
