French regular investigators today ordered the indictment of three senior officials of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime over the deaths of two French-Syrian citizens, Mazen Dabagh and his son Patrick, who were arrested in 2013, a source familiar with the case said.
In their order, the judges called for Ali Mamluk, Jamil Hasan and Abdel Salam Mahmoud to be tried for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Ali Mamlouk is the former head of Syrian Intelligence who in 2012 became the director of the National Security Office, the top intelligence authority in Syria.
Jamil Hassan was in turn the director of the of the Syrian Air Force when the two French-Syrians disappeared, while Abdel Salam Mahmoud was the head of the investigative branch of the PA Intelligence Service.
The defendants, against whom international arrest warrants have been issued, are expected to be tried in absentia.
«This decision paves the way, for the first time in France, for the trial of very high-ranking officials Syrian repressive apparatus,'' said the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Syrian Center for Media (SCM) and the League for Human Rights (LDH), a civil lawsuit in the case.
The prosecutor's office had launched a preliminary investigation in 2015, followed by a main investigation into enforced disappearances and torture constituting crimes against humanity in October 2016, following an appeal filed by the missing persons' brother and uncle, Obeida Dabagh.
The two French-Syrians, Patrick, a student at the Damascus School of Letters and Humanities, born in 1993, and Mazen Dabagh, a principal education adviser at the Damascus French School, born in 1956, were arrested in November 2013 by officers who said they belonged to the Syrian Intelligence Service. PA.
According to Mazen Dabagh's brother-in-law, who was arrested at the same time but released two days later, the two men were taken to al-Mezeh prison, alleged to be a regime torture center.
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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 Mazen on November 25, 2017.
< p> Source: APE-MPE
