German aid worker files a charge against the syrian regime for torture

 German aid worker Martin Lautwein accuses syrian intelligence forces of torture. The plaintiff is an aid worker who was based in Syria and Iraq. He claims to have been kidnapped along with an australian collegue from a basar in Damascus and held captive for 48 days in custody in 2018 where he claimes to have experienced torture, writes German newspaper WELT:

For the first time, a German citizen is taking legal action against Syrian officials for torture. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which supported him, announced on Tuesday that Martin Lautwein had filed a complaint with the Attorney General after his imprisonment in a Syrian prison. Lautwein was imprisoned in a military prison in Damascus for seven weeks in 2018. Initially, the Südwestrundfunk, the Westdeutsche Rundfunk and the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" reported on the case.

Lautwein worked in Iraq and Syria for an aid organization that set up medical infrastructure. According to the report, he was arrested along with an Australian colleague at a bazaar in Syria. He was tortured in prison, he told the media. During interrogation he was accused of working for a foreign secret service, which he denies. He also saw other inmates being mistreated and killed. "It's about breaking people by all means," he said.

The two colleagues were released after 48 days. According to the report, the Czech Republic negotiated the release - the country was the only EU country still to have an embassy in Syria. With the help of ECCHR, Lautwein joined a complaint from 13 Syrians that was originally filed in March 2017. It is directed against high-ranking officials in Syrian military intelligence.

"Lautwein's statement is important for dealing with the crimes in Syria," said Patrick Kroker, head of the Syria team at ECCHR. "So far, witnesses have mainly been able to report acts up to 2015, but his case proves that the same conditions prevailed in 2018 - it is probably still the case today." In Koblenz, the world's first trial against Syrians responsible for state torture has been running since April.

White Helmets: the backgrounds of the founder's suicide

 Interesting Long Read in the Guardian about James Le Mesurier, former officer in the British army and founder of Mayday Rescue and the syrian White Helmets and how he was driven to suicide by russian and syrian disinformation:

"Just before sunrise in Istanbul on 11 November 2019, a determined thumping on her iron front door stirred Emma Winberg from a brief sleep. Blurry-eyed, she grasped at the empty space in bed next to her, pulled on a pair of trousers, fumbled with a bedside lamp, then ran across the bedsit to the kitchen next door. “James wasn’t there,” she said. “And that’s when I just knew.”

Winberg had slept briefly after an anxious night. As she drifted off, at about 4.30am, she had seen her husband staring at her from near the bedroom window of their third-floor flat. Now, startled awake, she dashed towards the same spot, her dread rising with every step. “I looked down and thought: ‘Thank God, nothing there.’ And then I looked left.”

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Lying naked in the gloom below was James Le Mesurier, 48, a co-founder of the White Helmets, an organisation dedicated to rescuing civilians caught in the Syrian war. Worshippers who had been on their way to morning prayers at the nearby Kılıç Ali Paşa mosque now gathered silently around the body of a foreigner lying on a cobblestone lane. Plastic wrappings and bandages left by medics littered the scene. Not far away, freighters laden with cargo carved white wakes through the grey waters of the Bosphorus. Seagulls watched from a wall as the crowd of onlookers and police continued to swell. The autumn sun crept above the horizon."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/oct/27/syria-disinformation-war-white-helmets-mayday-rescue-james-le-mesurier

Two NGO's raise the veil on the Syrian chemical warfare program

 Several national and international investigation authorities have received a thoroughly compiled and rigorously researched bulletin on the chemical weapon armory the Syrian regime tried to conceal. The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and the Syrian Archive expose in this 90-page bulletin how the Syrian regime betrayed the OPCW and other actors on the destruction of its chemical weapon stockpile it had committed itself. 

French newspaper Le Monde gives a summary of the key findings:

"The veil that has long obscured the Syrian regime's chemical weapons program, allowing it to escape its commitments to the international community in this area, is beginning to tear. On Monday, October 19, two NGOs at the forefront of the fight against impunity in the Syrian conflict, Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and Syrian Archive, submitted to several national and international investigative bodies a report of depth and of unprecedented precision on the operation of this program, which has caused the death of hundreds of civilians since 2011.

This 90-page document, of which Le Monde, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and the Süddeutsche Zeitung have obtained an exclusive copy, reveals how the authorities in Damascus played off the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) , the body believed to have dismantled the Syrian chemical arsenal.

The report is based on analysis of open sources, on the use of data extracted from a United Nations register and above all on the testimonies of some fifty Syrian officials who have defected in recent years. Most were employed by the Center for Scientific Studies and Research (CERS), the state agency responsible for the development of Syrian conventional and unconventional weapons, which gives their words particularly valuable value.

Anwar Raslan trial: the mysterious circumstances of Raslans asylum in Germany

 During the trial in Koblenz suspicions arise why Raslan was granted asylum despite the fact that his function as an intelligence operative for the syrian regime was known to german authorities. Did german intelligence services expect informations on the syrian regime, asks Northern Germany Broadcasting NDR?:

"Despite warnings, the federal government brought a suspected Syrian chief torturer to Germany and granted him asylum without a hearing.

The Foreign Office was warned. Nevertheless, the Syrian Anwar R. got a visa for Germany in 2014 and, according to Panorama, received refugee protection and political asylum. The problem: Anwar R. was not a conventional war refugee. He previously served the Syrian regime as a senior intelligence officer. Anwar R. was the head of interrogation in the Intelligence Service Department 251, which is notorious for its torture practices and which also includes the Al-Khatib prison in Damascus.

German politicians confused about chairmanship of Assad crony in german-arabic chamber of commerce

 Several politicians in Germany have voiced their astonishment after the discovery that Assad Crony Mohamad Hamsho holds the chairmanship in german-arabic chamber of commerce "Ghorfa". Hamsho is close to Maher Al Assad, brother of syrian president Bashar Al Assad.

Human rights experts blame him to have arranged expropriations of inhabitants of neighborhoods hostile to the government in Damascus in order to retreive metals of destroyed homes and reconstruct the neighborhood after displacement of the population, writes german newspaper WELT:

"What does a man who is not allowed to enter Germany do in the presidium of a business association based in Berlin? A man whom the EU accuses of “benefiting from and providing support to the Syrian regime”. A regime guilty of "continued brutal repression and violation of human rights"?

These are the reasons for the sanctions, which also affect the Syrian Mohamad Hamsho. He is the owner of the Hamsho International Group and a member of the Presidium of the German-Arab Chamber of Commerce in Ghorfa, which resides on Berlin's Garrison Church Square, with an impressive view of the Pergamon Museum.

How France is tracking war criminals

 An interesting article about the french special unit OCLCH (Office central de lutte contre les crimes contre l'humanité, les génocides, les crimes de guerre) destined to identify and track war criminals. It has the particularity that it consists of members of Gendarmerie and Police.

The unit was created in 2013 and since then the men and women of this office tracked war criminals from Ex-Yugoslavia to Rwanda.

Recently, in may 2020, the officers of the OCLCH identified and arrested Félicien Kabuga bankroller of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda 1992.

The same fate is approaching to syrian war criminals.

"Saturday May 16, 2020, Asnières (Hauts-de-Seine). The first light of day appears when investigators discreetly get out of their cars. Head to a neat five-story building. On the back of their uniform, five words: "Office central war crimes." It is here, in this small street in the Parisian suburbs, that lives one of the main culprits of the genocide in Rwanda, perpetrated in 1994. That year, 800,000 people, according to the UN, were killed in a few weeks after the decision of the Hutu extremists in power to exterminate the Tutsi ethnic group.

Félicien Kabuga is suspected of having financed a bloodthirsty militia and of having called for the massacre of Tutsis through the Mille Collines radio station, of which he was one of the leaders. This Rwandan is targeted by an arrest warrant from the International Mechanism, the UN structure responsible for completing the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Pursued by international justice for ... twenty-six years.

Raslan Trial: testimony of former intelligence operative at "Al-Khatib"-branch

 An anonymous witness who claims to have worked at "Al-Khatib"-branch has incrimanted the defendant, detailing torture methods and the chain of command that Raslan was heading, taz: 

"The witness will appear “partially masked”, says the presiding judge Anne Kerber. Because of "the risk situation" he does not have to give his personal details. The identity of the witness, who testified on Wednesday and Thursday in room 128 of the Koblenz Higher Regional Court, is kept secret, in the files he is named Z 28/07/16. It is the first such testimony of its kind in the trial in which two Syrians have been on trial for crimes against humanity since the end of April.