Two French investigating judges ordered on Tuesday that three senior officials of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad be tried at the assizes for the death of two Franco-Syrian citizens, Mazzen Dabbagh and his son Patrick, arrested in 2013, learned the AFP from a source close to the file.
In their indictment order, of which AFP has knowledge, the magistrates requested a trial for complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes against Ali Mamlouk, Jamil Hassan and Abdel Salam Mahmoud .
Ali Mamlouk is the former head of Syrian intelligence who became director of the National Security Office in 2012, the highest intelligence body in Syria.
Jamil Hassan was for his part director of the intelligence services of the Syrian Air Force during the disappearance of the two Franco-Syrians, while Abdel Salam Mahmoud was director of the investigation branch of the intelligence service of the army. air.
Targeted by international arrest warrants, the accused should be tried in absentia.
“This decision paves the way, for the first time in France, for the trial of very senior officials of the Syrian repressive apparatus”, welcomed in a press release the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Syrian Center for the media (SCM) and the League for Human Rights (LDH), civil parties in the case.
The prosecution had opened a preliminary investigation in 2015, then a judicial investigation had been opened for enforced disappearances and acts of torture constituting crimes against humanity in October 2016, after a report made by the brother and uncle of the disappeared, Obeïda Dabbagh.
The two Franco-Syrians, a student at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences in Damascus born in 1993 for the first and principal education adviser at the French School in Damascus born in 1956 for the second, were arrested in November 2013 by officers claiming to belong to the intelligence services of the Syrian Air Force.
According to Mazzen Dabbagh’s brother-in-law, arrested at the same time as him but released two days later, the two men were transferred to al-Mezzeh prison, denounced as a regime torture center.
Then they 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 Mazzen on November 25, 2017.