A former spokesman for the Syrian armed group Jaysh al Islam (Army of Islam), suspected in particular of torture and war crimes, was arrested Wednesday in France and indicted on Friday, AFP learned from a source judicial.
This man, born in 1988 and who was in France on an Erasmus visa, was arrested in Marseille. After 48 hours in police custody, he was brought before a Parisian examining magistrate who put him under investigation, in particular for "acts of torture and complicity", "war crimes" and "complicity in disappearances forced ”. A liberty and detention judge must now rule on his possible placement in pre-trial detention, required by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (Pnat).
Abduction of journalist and activist Razan Zeitouneh
The Jaysh al Islam group is particularly suspected of the kidnapping on December 9, 2013 of the Syrian lawyer and journalist Razan Zeitouneh, her husband Waël Hamada and two of his collaborators, who were never found.
Razan Zeitouneh had been one of the figures of the popular uprising launched in March 2011 against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and had received that year the Sakharov Prize for human rights together with other activists of the "Spring Arabic ”. She then criticized the human rights violations committed by all the parties to the conflict.
A complaint filed in June 2019
A complaint against members of this Islamist group had been filed last June with the crimes against humanity center of the Pnat for "acts of torture", "enforced disappearances", "crimes against humanity and war crimes", committed in Ghouta between 2012 and April 2018 The initiative was carried by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the League for Human Rights (LDH) and the Syrian Media Center (SCM), as well only by seven members of Razan Zeitouneh's family.
This indictment opens "the way to the first judicial investigation into the crimes committed by the armed group," the FIDH welcomed this Friday in a press release.
According to the NGO, the man arrested under the name of Islam Alloush is actually called Majdi Mustafa Nameh. He "is among the senior officials of Jaysh al Islam", who "counted up to more than 20,000 combatants and caused terror to reign in the rebel areas it controlled, mainly in eastern Ghouta, which it lost control in April 2018 ”.
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