Germany arrests Syrian man accused over 2013 Tadamon massacre
By Jwan Shekaki
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – German authorities arrested on Thursday a Syrian man in charge of Tadamon massacre in Damascus, Syria’s capital, in 2013.
The man, called Ahmad H, is accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes including torture and enslavement, German prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday.
Ahmad was leading a pro-government militia in Tadamon, when the massacre took place in 2013 that resulted in the killing of about 40 people. The massacre was filmed by its perpetrators and revealed by The Guardian last year.
In April 2022, The Guardian published a report that showed members of the Syrian Military Intelligence Branch 227 were shown firing at blindfolded, unarmed civilians in Tadamon, a residential neighborhood in the Syrian capital of Damascus. The video showed 41 people being murdered by an intelligence officer called Amjad Yousef.
In March, the US Department of State issued a decision in which it barred Yousef from entering US territory. The decision barred Yousef, his wife, and close family members from entering US territory. “Yousef’s war crimes serves as a sobering reminder for why countries should not normalize relations with the Assad regime absent enduring progress towards a political resolution,” said Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, in an accompanying statement.
The suspect, Ahmad H, is the first person to be detained in connection with crimes in Tadamon, The Guardian reported. “He was a local leader of the Shabiha, a pro-regime paramilitary group tasked with suppressing political opponents. The group is accused of regularly detaining civilians at checkpoints in Tadamon, whom they tortured, extorted or forced into labour, prosecutors said.”
According to the British newspaper, 27 extremely graphic videos of Shabiha and Syrian soldiers carrying out massacres and disposing of dozens bodies in the neighbourhood were leaked from a Syrian government laptop to two academics based in Europe in 2019.
The academics are Prof. Uğur Üngör, from the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and the researcher Annsar Shahoud identified many of the perpetrators in the videos, including Amjad Yousef.
Ahmad H, understood by The Guardian to be an associate of Yusuf, is accused of “personally participating in the abuse of civilians in various occasions”, the prosecutors said.
With the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled their country to Germany. Among the refugees, there were several pro-government officers and leaders.
Last year, Germany sentenced Anwar Raslan, ex-colonel of the Syrian Intelligence, to life in prison for crimes against humanity for his part in murdering 58 detainees, raping others, and torturing about 4,000 prisoners.
Also, Alaa Mousa, a doctor who worked at a military intelligence prison in the Syrian city of Homs from April 2011 until late 2012, was accused of torturing and killing inmates at a government-run prison and two military hospitals, German prosecutors said last year.
He is accused of killing one person and 18 counts of torture, as well as causing serious physical and psychological harm to others.
The doctor has been in pretrial detention in Germany since his arrest in June 2020.