History: the goal is not exaggerated to qualify the trial of Anwar Aslan and Eyad Al-Gharib, which opens Thursday, April 23, in Koblenz, in the west of Germany. Accused of crimes against humanity, these two former members of Bashar Al-Assad's intelligence services are the first to appear in justice for abuses committed by the Syrian regime since 2011, the year of the start of the war ravaging the country. .
Aged 57, Anwar Aslan must answer for the deaths of 58 people and the abuse inflicted on more than 4,000 others, from April 2011 to September 2012, in the Al-Khatib detention center in Damascus, including he was in charge. Eyad Al-Gharib, 43, who worked under him, is accused of participating in torture against at least 30 protesters arrested in Douma, near the Syrian capital, in the fall of 2011.
The two defendants fled their country a few months after the crimes they are accountable for today. Settled in Germany, where they thought they were going to start their lives again, that's where they were arrested, in February 2019, notably thanks to one of the ex-victims of Anwar Aslan, who had recognized him in a home asylum seekers and then in a department store in Berlin.
"Universal jurisdiction"
The arrests of the two accused were possible because Germany decided to use the principle of "universal jurisdiction", which authorizes a State to prosecute the perpetrators of particularly serious crimes, regardless of their nationality or the place where the acts took place. been committed. A principle also used by France, which led to the arrest, in February 2019, of another henchman of Anwar Aslan, as part of a preliminary investigation opened by the Paris prosecutor's office for "Acts of torture, crimes against humanity and complicity in these crimes", committed in Syria between 2011 and 2013.
The charges against the two accused who will be tried in Koblenz are based on two sources of information. One is the “Caesar” file, the pseudonym of a photographer for the Syrian military police, who fled his country in July 2013, taking more than 50,000 photos of the bodies of detainees who died of hunger, disease or death. torture, from 2011 to 2013. The other source is the complaints lodged with the federal parquet of Karlsruhe by about thirty Syrians survivors of the jails of Bachar Al-Assad and refugees since in Germany.
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