Raslan trial: co-defendant Eyad Al-Gharib senteced to 4,5 years

 The Koblenz court judging two syrian intelligence operatives has issued a verdict against Anwar Raslan's co-defendant Eyad Al-Gharib, writes german newspaper BILD:

He helped torture 30 people. Now Syrian Eyad A. (44) has to be imprisoned for four and a half years for complicity in a crime against humanity.

The State Security Senate of the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz sentenced him on Wednesday. It was the world's first criminal trial for state torture in Syria.

According to this, the court was able to prove to the former employee of the Syrian General Intelligence Service (subdivision 40) that he had helped other perpetrators “in the context of an extensive and systematic attack on the civilian population” to “seriously deprive 30 people of physical freedom and during Torture Detention ”.

Specifically, in September / October 2011, after the brutal dissolution of a demo in Douma (Syria), Eyad A. arrested fleeing demonstrators and brought them to prison in Department 251. While monitoring this transport, he saw that the prisoners were already being beaten at this point.

In prison, those arrested were then severely abused and systematically tortured with, among other things, beatings, kicks and electric shocks - he knew this and accepted that with approval. He also knew that the torture was part of a well-organized government effort to suppress the opposition. The prisoners were also denied medical care, personal hygiene and food.

Evidence: witness statements, expert statements - and his confession during an interrogation in August 2018.

The court assessed as mitigating the penalty that his statements led to a trial against an accomplice, that the act was committed in a strictly hierarchical, no-deviating command structure, that he acted as an assistant and, through his self-incriminations, contributed significantly to the evidence of the allegation .

Interview with Wolfgang Kaleck of ECCHR

 A quite interesting interview with lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck of the  European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin:

Wolfgang Kaleck, a 60-year-old human rights lawyer with large blue eyes and a wave of sandy brown hair, smiles a lot for someone who has spent his life litigating some of the world’s worst atrocities. “The stories you hear you won’t forget,” he says, sitting at a long table in his office in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. “But at the same time you learn about these cruel facts of the world, you learn about the light side, which is that there’s resistance basically everywhere.” He should know: For the better part of three decades, he has pursued cases across borders on behalf of victims who have been disappeared by the military dictatorship in Argentina and spied upon by the East German Stasi. He has filed criminal complaints against former U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, and current Director Gina Haspel. And now he’s taking on one of the biggest bad guys of them all: Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

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

https://newrepublic.com/article/160515/man-wants-take-bashar-al-assad

Did austrian authorities shield a syrian intelligence officer?

 An author on the "Amnesty International UK" page claims, undergirded by numerous links to other publications, that austrian intelligence covered a syrian torturer and high-ranking intelligence operative:

"As a Syrian human rights defender, you get used to disappointment - but what I read one cold morning last November was on another level of dismay. I came across a remarkable investigation by the Austrian newspaper Kurier which said the Austrian government, aided by Israel’s Mossad, had hid a Syrian Lieutenant General wanted for investigation by the French authorities for crimes against humanity and war crimes. 

Under “Operation White Milk'', a joint Austrian-Israeli operation, Khaled Halabi was hidden in Austria and given a new identity and name (Alexander). Halabi was the head of the Syrian General Intelligence Branch 335. The General Intelligence Directorate is one of the four main pillars of the Syrian Regime's repression architecture that has tortured, disappeared, and killed more than a million Syrians since March 2011, including women and children. It is the same directorate that Colonel Anwar Raslan works for. Raslan is currently on trial in Koblenz, Germany, charged with the torture of 4000 people as well as murder and sexual abuse. However, Halabi was a higher rank than Raslan and would have had extensive knowledge of and involvement in the Assad regimes torture network.

The trial in Koblenz has given many of us Syrians some level of hope and optimism - but it now seems that the Austrian authorities are actively trying to counter those international efforts and undermining the global fight against impunity and mass atrocities with its strange and troubling protection of Khaled Halabi."

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

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/campaigns-blog/why-did-austria-protect-assad-regime-torture-chief

Germany: prosecutors hunt perpatrators of Ghouta gas attack

 "German prosecutors are currently collecting witness testimonies, documents and videos incriminating Syria in what are believed to be war crimes. The evidence against the Assad regime compiled by groups that have filed a criminal complaint in Germany is overwhelming", writes germany newpaper SPON:

"Salim Namour’s colleagues at the underground hospital in East Ghouta saw him as a rock of stability. The veteran doctor even called himself that: Sakhr, the rock. But on Aug. 21, 2013, Namour, too, reached his limits. "It was like Judgment Day," the doctor recalls.

Overnight, Volcano and M14 rockets rained down on rebel-held suburbs near Damascus, striking residential buildings. Impacts were also reported near mosques and at a primary school.

Namour recalls hearing over the radio that all doctors should head to the hospital immediately. Upon arrival, he saw the injured everywhere, many with no signs of any external wounds. People were struggling to breathe and were having seizures. Saliva oozed from their mouths. "The dying, the dead, it was horrible,” says Namour. Everything seemed to point to a poison gas attack.

Inside the cave, as the doctors called their underground hospital, they tore the clothes off the injured and rinsed them in water. They gave them shots of atropine as an antidote and administered oxygen. Namour and his colleagues fought to save lives until the next day at noon. But in many cases, they lost the battle.2

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

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-prosecutors-are-collecting-evidence-on-chemical-weapons-attacks-in-syria-a-74fec59c-9461-42f6-a6a4-dc89e1a08692

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.