Three high-ranking Syrian intelligence officers have been sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by a French court for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The Paris criminal court also ordered the arrest warrants to be upheld on Friday. The men are accused of being responsible for the deaths of two French citizens in Syria.
The three accused, who were tried in absentia, are Ali Mamlouk, Jamil Hassan and Abdel Salam Mahmoud.
Mamlouk was the director of the Syrian National Security Bureau. He was considered a close confidant and important adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Hassan was head of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate until a few years ago. According to reports from Syrian victims, hundreds of suspected opponents of al-Assad were tortured and murdered during his time in office.
Salam Mahmoud, on the other hand, headed the Air Force Intelligence Investigation Directorate at an important military airport near Damascus, where the two dual nationals were detained.
Specifically, the case centred on two French-Syrian citizens who, according to the public prosecutor's office, were detained by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate in Damascus at the beginning of November 2013.
Death certificates were handed over to their relatives in August 2018. According to the documents, the men died in 2014 and 2017 without their relatives ever seeing their bodies.
The two men were taken to an airport in Damascus, where thousands of opposition activists were allegedly detained, tortured and killed at the time, witnesses said.
It was the first trial in which such high-ranking representatives of the Syrian regime had been convicted of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, said lawyer Clémence Bectarte, who represented several co-plaintiffs in the case, according to the newspaper Le Figaro.
This is a judgement that is important for hundreds of thousands of Syrians who are still waiting for justice, she explained.