Trial updates: First trial worldwide on torture in Syria

Syria – Torture – Trial monitoring

ECCHR supported Syrian torture survivors in the al-Khatib trial at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany. Read on for regular updates on the proceedings.

تجدون هنا النسخة العربية لموقعنا الإلكتروني

Context

ECCHR supported 17 torture survivors who gave witnesses testimony to the German Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt). Seven were joint plaintiffs in the trial and were represented by our partner lawyers.

Media

Anwar R and one of his lawyers © Nasser Husein
Anwar R and one of his lawyers © Nasser Husein

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Background

ECCHR’s work on the al-Khatib trial is part of a series of criminal complaints we and nearly 100 Syrians submitted in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Norway. As no official transcripts of the trial were published, ECCHR documented the al-Khatib trial.

All participants, but by now also a broader public around the world and especially Syrian human rights activists, anxiously awaited the 108th day of the al-Khatib trial. This was the day when the verdict in the case of Anwar R was to be handed down, after a trial that had lasted almost two years with more than 100 days of hearings and almost 80 witness statements.

Already by five o’clock in the morning, the first of those following the trial had gathered in front of the red building of the Koblenz courthouse to make sure they would get a seat in the courtroom. The mood was full of anticipation, as the events of the previous trial days were discussed and the first interviews were given. Relatives displayed pictures of disappeared family members, once again bringing the fate of the Syrian community to the attention of those around them. Finally, the doors were opened. Due to limited seating, however, only a small number of those waiting were allowed into the building.

The session began. The court had approved a consecutive translation into Arabic, which enabled Syrians and Arabic-speaking media correspondents to directly follow the proceedings. Then, the Senate announced the verdict: the court found Anwar R guilty as a co-perpetrator in crimes against humanity in the form of killing, torture, severe deprivation of liberty, rape and sexual coercion as defined in the German Code of Crimes against International Law (CCAIL) – in concurrence with the offenses of murder, dangerous bodily harm, especially severe rape, sexual coercion, deprivation of liberty extending beyond a week, hostage-taking and sexual abuse of prisoners, according to the German Criminal Code.

With Anwar R, for the first time, a court had found a higher-ranking ex-employee of the Assad regime guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison.

The presiding judge emphasized that trials such as this one, which address crimes under the CCAIL, are particularly extensive and complex. The fact that a verdict could now be announced after 108 days of proceedings was also thanks to the dedicated collection and processing of evidence by German and European law enforcement agencies. Moreover, the witnesses deserved tremendous respect, some of whom testified despite great fear of the Syrian regime.

In justifying the verdict, the court initially referred to the fact that the verdict against Eyad A had already established that a systematic attack against the civilian population had been taking place in Syria since 2011 (see trial report 60/2). As with the reasoning behind Eyad A’s conviction, the chairwoman outlined how Syria had increasingly developed into an autocratic regime under Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad. The repression relied upon the extensive intelligence apparatus, which worked to closely monitor the population and suppress any resistance against the government. From the end of 2010 onward, increasingly larger segments of the Syrian population had publicly expressed their opposition to the regime. The regime’s goal had been to put down these protests at all costs with the use of armed force. The chairwoman described how state repression had continued to increase and numerous people had been killed or arrested and tortured during peaceful demonstrations.

The reasoning also described how this torture was carried out in the prisons of the intelligence services – for example, by electric shocks, burns, hanging by the wrists, overstretching of the upper body to the point of breaking the spine, forcing of the body into a car tire, and sexual violence against men and women to the point of rape. Detainees had not only died from torture, but had also starved and suffocated in prisons. All of this had been proven to the conviction of the court by the statements of experts, the testimonies of witnesses and, in particular, the photographs of the Syrian military photographer “Caesar.”

The chairwoman then explained the role of Branch 251 of the General Intelligence Service, located in Damascus in the al-Khatib district, whose interrogation subdivision Anwar R headed until September 2012. The al-Khatib prison was located in the basement of the branch. Subdivision 40 was also formally assigned to Branch 251 as a rapid response squad to quell dissident demonstrations. The arrested demonstrators were brought to Branch 251, where they were typically subjected to a so-called welcome party, during which the guards beat them. Afterwards, they were housed in the prison basement, which was so overcrowded that some of them had to sleep standing up. The sanitary conditions were catastrophic. The prisoners suffered from extremely stifling air and malnutrition, skin rashes and scabies; there was mostly only artificial light, and their injuries had not been adequately treated. The audible cries of agony from tortured prisoners were ever-present, and mixed with the uncertainty concerning their own fate, this had led to enormous psychological stress for prisoners, to the point where some had suffered psychological breakdowns or tried to commit suicide. These circumstances on their own were enough to be considered torture. In addition, forms of abuse that exceeded this were common during the interrogations of the detainees.

The court then turned to the role of Anwar R. Within the interrogation subdivision he had become the supervisor of 30 to 40 people, including official interrogators, between 2008 and 2012. He did not have to specifically order the use of torture, as this had been practiced by the Syrian intelligence service for decades. Like every Syrian, he had already known this when he joined the intelligence service, but had nonetheless consented to it in the interest of his social and economic advancement. This attitude later on also remained the same. The defendant also had influence extending beyond his department. He had made suggestions to his superior regarding the ensuing treatment of the inmates and in some cases had also initiated the release of witnesses. Anwar R had known about the devastating conditions of detention, as well as the torture, and had at least condoned the deaths. If anything, he regarded detainees’ deaths as irritating because no further information could be obtained from them.

There was no evidence supporting Anwar R’s assertion that he no longer held any command authority from June 2011 onwards, that he had made efforts to receive a transfer, or that he had not been able to flee with his family earlier than September 2012. Rather, there were numerous indications that Anwar R still had held his position of power in 2012. For example, he still had the power in 2012 to arrange for the release of a witness. At the end of 2012, he was still a member of a high-ranking committee that decided on travel restrictions for retired officers who wanted to leave Syria. Why an officer whose loyalty was in doubt had been left in a high-ranking position was just as incomprehensible as why the defendant had been unable to flee before December 2012.

During the period in which Anwar R had been head of the subdivision, at least 27 people had died as a result of the conditions which prevailed there. The Senate further estimated the number of persons who had been detained at the al-Khatib Branch during the period of the crime – and who had thus already been tortured, according to the definition of the CCAIL, due to the inhumane conditions of detention – to be at least 4,000.

The court then turned to the 22 joint plaintiffs, the majority of whom were present in the courtroom. One by one, for each of the joint plaintiffs, the court described and acknowledged the acts committed against them.

The chairwoman then explained the legal assessment of the facts. The court came to the conclusion that Anwar R did not merely assist but co-perpetrated crimes against humanity. He pursued the goal of supporting the regime so as not to jeopardize his career or expose himself to repressive retaliation. He had not been a small cog, but the head of the interrogation subdivision with the rank of colonel, possessing commanding authority. He also had considerable influence on the success of the crime as a whole, as his activities had contributed to the regime’s suppression of the opposition. He had continued his activity without coercion, with awareness of the circumstances. He had known about the interrogation procedures, the deaths, the sexually motivated assaults and the conditions in the prison, and had at least condoned all of this.

The court also did not follow the defense’s argument that the circumstances had constituted necessity as defense for Anwar R. There was no doubt that he acted with guilt. It would have been possible and, in light of the seriousness of the crimes, reasonable for him to have removed himself from the system earlier on by deserting.

The court then cited the criminal offenses that had been committed. Here, it also referred once again to the issue of enforced disappearances at the al-Khatib Branch. ECCHR partner lawyers had requested the court earlier on in the proceedings to also consider this crime. The court now stated that a conviction for enforced disappearance was not an option because the law requires an inquiry into the whereabouts of the disappeared. However, it had not been possible to establish the corresponding findings in the period of the crimes charged. Furthermore, in one case, it could not be established with the necessary certainty that the defendant had intentionally provided false information.

With regard to sentencing, the court imposed the legally mandatory life sentence. However, it did not follow the request of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office to determine the particular severity of guilt. The large number of victims, the long duration of the period of the crime and the inhumane circumstances of the crimes would have mitigated in favor of that. However, it had to be taken into account for the benefit of Anwar R that he had not been punished for other crimes since, that he had acted only with conditional intent with regard to the killings, and that he had arranged for the release of prisoners. In addition, he had turned his back on the regime. He had also expressed compassion for the detainees and made a partial confession.

With that, the session was closed.

In the meantime, news of the verdict had already spread throughout Germany and the world, and all those involved who had not made it into the courtroom, along with a large number of journalists, were already waiting outside. Many of those affected fell into each other’s arms – some relieved about the verdict and the end of the trial, others also disappointed about the lack of a determination of the particular severity of guilt. At a press conference, Anwar R’s lawyers immediately announced that they would appeal the verdict. The ECCHR partner lawyers and some of the joint plaintiffs, on the other hand, declared themselves satisfied with the decision, which finally makes it unequivocal, not only in Germany, but also for Syrians and the whole world, that the grave crimes in Syria will not go unseen and unpunished.

The second to last day of every trial in Germany is reserved for the defense. On 6 January, Anwar R and his lawyers also had the opportunity to give closing remarks on the charges and the previous 106 days of the trial. Approximately 25 audience members and journalists, as well as two of the joint plaintiffs, were present.

The defense lawyers began their statements – and called for the acquittal of their client. They initially emphasized that their remarks should in no way be misconstrued as an attempt to make light of the suffering of the joint plaintiffs and those affected. Nor should they be understood as a justification of the system of injustice, which endures under the rule of Bashar al-Assad, or the torture within Syrian prisons. All those involved – including Anwar R – remain stunned by the “continuing situation of contempt for humanity.” No one in the Syrian regime should get the idea that such crimes are tolerated.

After this, they stressed that these proceedings, however, are not about the Syrian regime. Anwar R should not be tried on behalf of Assad. Rather, it must be determined whether and in what way R had committed a crime. However, this would require that he was individually responsible for the crimes charged – and this had not been proven in the trial. Instead, the trial had shown that Anwar R and the joint plaintiffs had “suffered a common fate”: the Syrian regime. The determination of R’s potential guilt thus concerned whether he was criminally – not morally – responsible.

Furthermore, the lawyers argued that the crimes in the al-Khatib Branch could not be attributed to Anwar R. He himself had not tortured people. Nor could his responsibility be inferred from the fact that he did not stop the actions of others – he had no commanding authority over the prison. He had “only” been the head of the interrogation unit, i.e. had not taken on a supervisory role. In addition, Anwar R himself had been under observation since June 2011 because he had released detainees and contradicted his superiors. Therefore, according to his own statements, he had already been relieved of his authority at that time. This had not been refuted by the statements of the witnesses.

The defense also repeatedly referred at length to the testimony of the first defendant, Eyad A, who was sentenced in February 2021 (see trial report 60/2), and emphasized that he was not a credible witness for the prosecution in the proceedings against R.

In addition, Anwar R had had no choice but to initially continue his activities at the al-Khatib Branch from the spring of 2011 onwards. He and his family had been in mortal danger, and as a result, he had found himself in desperate circumstances. An employee of a criminal regime could not simply pick up the phone when he noticed that torture was being carried out in his basement in order to report it to his superior. Anwar R had not wanted for there to be torture, and to the extent to which he was capable, had put a stop to it, as well as released inmates and even punished soldiers for engaging in maltreatment. Finally, he had deserted as soon as he was able to do so and had worked for the opposition. Therefore, he could not be blamed – individual guilt could only be assumed if the perpetrator had been in a position to decide between right and wrong.

Finally, Anwar R was given the last word, which began with “In the name of Allah.” As was the case during the entire trial, he did not speak himself, but had his lawyers read out an almost hour-long statement, in which he proclaimed an “unadulterated truth” and again denied all responsibility. He reiterated that he had played only a “marginal role” at the al-Khatib Branch as of June 2011. He had “not given a single order to torture, use force against or mistreat a prisoner.” He had done everything he could to help the inmates despite threats from his superiors, he said. Then, he said, he deserted because he no longer wanted to be an “instrument of injury and killing.” Addressing all Syrian people and especially the relatives of the victims and the injured, he conveyed that he was extremely sorry that he had not been able to help more to stop the machinery of death. Since the outbreak of the uprisings, he had rejected the humiliation of this great people, to which he also belonged and whose feelings and suffering he shared. He counted himself and his relatives among the victims as well, and the three years of imprisonment, illness and separation from his family weighed heavily on him.

In conclusion, Anwar R quoted from the Quran: “Whoever kills a human being without committing murder or causing mischief on earth, it is as if he had killed all human beings, and whoever keeps one alive, it is as if he keeps all human beings alive.” He seemed to be referring to the detainees he claimed to have helped. But there was no mention of the people who died in the al-Khatib prison. Finally, he concluded by saying that he would respect the forthcoming verdict because he had confidence in the German legal system.

The presiding judge then canceled the upcoming trial day on 12 January and announced that the verdict would be handed down at 10 am on 13 January. The court would open at 7 am on that day, and an additional room for press representatives would be prepared.

On days 105 and 106 of the al-Khatib trial, the joint plaintiffs and their lawyers had their say. A selection of the statements by the plaintiffs can be found below. We are not publishing a trial report for these days, as we believe the statements stand on their own.

Esteemed Judges,

Since I left Syria, I don’t know whether to feel happiness because I survived or sorrow for the tens of thousands of unfortunate people who are still being held in conditions of enforced disappearance.

Our dream was a simple one, even if most German citizens do not usually think about such things, as for them it is a fact often taken for granted: to have a homeland that protects us and respects our humanity, and a state that treats all its citizens equally in accordance with the law. Despite the simplicity of this dream that should now be a matter of course by 21st century standards, we knew that the price of this demand would be enormous. But we did not expect, even in our worst nightmares, that the regime would be prepared to escalate its crimes beyond what any ordinary person could imagine.

When the president of Tunisia fled and then the Egyptian president resigned, we were certain that this dream belonged not only to individuals or small groups, but to millions of people in our overall region. We believed that it could also be fulfilled in Syria by the power of the people, although the history of the regime since the 1980s was well known to us. We took to the streets with the demand to reclaim our homeland, equipped only with our collective voice and will. The security apparatus and the military responded with live ammunition. Two bullets flew past me, one of which almost hit my head. I was lucky, or else I would not be here today, but hundreds of thousands of others were not so lucky.

Because we would not let ourselves be deterred by gunfire, the regime decided to confront us with armored vehicles and tanks, surrounding and starving out towns and communities. Incredible video footage documents the bombardment of residential areas with all types of weapons. I remember one of these videos: the cameraman was filming a tank bombardment of a residential neighborhood in Tall Kalakh. The soldiers appeared to have been watching him, and as the tank’s cannon took aim at him, he stood there nailed to the ground, not knowing what to do. He shouted that the tank was about to shoot him. And that is exactly what happened. The young man fell, and only his phone survived, so we were able to see this clip a few days later.

I do not want to go into all the details of the crimes committed by the regime and its supporters, from the bombing of civilians to the destruction of the whole of Syria. The Federal Prosecutors spoke about this more than once in a way that made an impression on me because it revealed how many details of the Syrian tragedy were actually known to them. Pictures and videos often express more than words. But I want to talk about something that pictures do not usually convey, namely, the experience of detention and of enforced disappearance.

It is frightening enough to be subjected to live ammunition when you’re unarmed, and it’s even scarier to be bombarded with all manner of weapons, including planes – but nothing can describe the horror of being detained in Syria.

In the early months of the revolution, a detachment of hundreds of security forces attacked the town of Harasta, where I lived. Harasta was in the jurisdiction of the al-Khatib Branch. I was visiting my family’s house, which was 200 meters away from my apartment, while my wife and two children stayed at home. We heard a strange noise outside and opened the door to see what was happening; we then were confronted by intelligence officers shouting at us. We realized they were storming the neighborhood. I tried to contact my wife, but all the phone lines in the city were dead. I wanted to go back and check on my wife and children, but my mother rightly prevented me from doing so, because if I had gone out onto the street, I might never have come back, like many others who were arrested that day.

I don’t know how long it lasted, but it felt like years. I was overwhelmed with the fear of being a wanted man, that they would enter my home, not find me, and harm my wife and children. Or they would come to my parents’ house and take me away, so that I would disappear “behind the sun” and that “even the blue flies would not know” where I was.

Esteemed Judges,

I respect your decision not to include the crime of enforced disappearance in the charges against the defendant. I also may not have the evidence required by law to establish that enforced disappearance is a systematic process pursued by the regime and applied with full awareness of its consequences on the part of the military and intelligence services with the aim of terrorizing Syrian society. But I would like to tell you about this crime from my own lived experience because what we are presenting here also constitutes an historical documentation in the interest of all Syrians and all human rights defenders.

When the interests of a security official come into conflict with a citizen of Syria, the first thing we hear from these henchmen is the following phrase: “I will take you behind the sun and even the blue flies will not know where you are.” The citizen is then forced to back down because he knows exactly what this means and that for the official, carrying out this threat is easier than taking a sip of water.

The purpose of this threat is to intimidate the other party, and it is a recipe that has been often implemented by the regime and its officials. In fact, enforced disappearance must be considered not only a crime against humanity, but also an act of terror, because it aims to terrorize society and force it to submit to power.

“To disappear behind the sun” means to live in the darkness and to be banished from life without actually dying. The individual becomes Schrödinger’s cat, as those on the outside do not know whether he is dead or alive. These two possibilities are also present at all times for the prisoner himself, as well as for the prison guards and officials. The officer or warden himself does not know whether he is going to kill someone in the next minute; he might suddenly become angry about something his son has done and because of that, kill a prisoner who happens to be in front of him at that moment. Yes, it is that simple for them! What is even worse is that the prisoner does not know his own fate in the next instant. While of course no one can tell the future, the difference between the two situations is fundamental: the prisoner does not die naturally, but is murdered, probably in the most horrible way. The prisoner has no means of resisting this fate.

“To disappear in the darkness behind the sun” means to lose one’s sense of time. I ask you to devote five minutes of your time to imagining that you are in a confined, dark place where not a single ray of light ever enters, where “even the flies do not stray,” and where one has lost all connection to time. After a few days, you no longer know whether it is day or night, as if you no longer exist at all. Light and darkness become meaningless; you forget what trees and leaves look like, along with the smell of flowers. And what is life other than these small details?

Einstein once dismissed all scientific evidence and said, “I want to know that the moon exists whether I can see it or not!” He was practically obsessed with the idea. In detention, we become crazy because we are no longer sure of anything. I cried once just because I heard a prayer call, even though I am not religious! I cried because I heard a sound that was something other than the prison guards; I cried because I remembered for a moment that life is more than this darkness I was living in. I cried in that moment, even though I did not cry during the daily torture and torments I lived through at the time.

Do you know why I fled Syria? Not out of fear of dying by a bullet or gunfire, but because of precisely this fear of disappearing again. Yes, the intelligence officers, one of whom is standing trial here, succeeded in terrorizing me to the point where I was compelled to flee. Enforced disappearance is one of the crucial elements of a systematic policy of the regime to silence or get rid of us. This method is well known and adopted by all those who have collaborated with the regime, and the defendant was an important and senior agent of this regime.

I fled because I did not want my family to experience for a third time the nightmare of never-ending questions weighing on their lives: did they kill him? Is he still alive? Did they hang him somewhere? Did they break his back? Are they torturing him right now while we are eating? Did this happen and did that happen? Despite the bitterness of the death of a loved one, the families of prisoners can at least have closure, which, albeit painful, puts an end to these uncertainties when the death of their loved one is confirmed. A distant and vague hope, on the other hand, is even more agonizing and exhausting.

When I was arrested by the al-Khatib Branch, I was on my way to an appointment for work. After my release, my then three-and-a-half-year-old son cried every time I left the house. He thought that if I left, I would not come back. I never dared to promise him that I would come back in the evening because I might not be able to keep that promise, and in fact that is exactly what happened: one time, when I was again outside, I didn’t come back until four years later.

What hurts perhaps more than the killing and torture is the zeal that these employees and officers have in doing the utmost harm to us. I am convinced that they were not just carrying out orders, but were taking revenge on us for trying to take away their absolute power, that power given to them as part of the regime’s control machine, a power that stands outside of any law or morality and that they can use however and whenever it suits them.

I was ten years old when I began to understand the people’s fear of the Syrian intelligence services and to grasp the warnings I received from those around me not to say anything that might displease these officials. Parents warned their children that the slightest word could lead to the disappearance of the whole family.

At the age of ten, I began to feel disgusted by everyone who worked in the intelligence services and their family members, who were proud to be in a position of power that allowed them to terrorize those around them.

My uncle was arrested in the 1980s and tortured for six years because he belonged to the Communist Party. Three members of a friend’s family, his father, uncle and brother, disappeared, and since then, no one knows what became of them – just because they were suspected of opposing the regime.

There is no Syrian, adult or child, who does not know about the crimes the Syrian intelligence services have committed and continue to commit. Anyone who has voluntarily registered to work for them has consciously chosen to be a tool in committing crimes against humanity. In this sense, no intelligence officer, regardless of his position, can claim that he was merely following orders, that he was forced, or that his role was only marginal. Everyone in the intelligence services is an active part of that apparatus and is responsible for his or her actions. It goes without saying that the higher one’s position is, the more egregious the crimes are for which he is responsible. More significantly, the higher one’s position is, the more aware he was when joining one of the security services that he would commit crimes.

I might have been able to forgive the defendant for his crimes committed against me. But in his testimony at the beginning of the trial, he showed no remorse or sense of responsibility for the crimes he committed or contributed to, and he claims to this day that there was no systematic torture in the al-Khatib Branch. I could have forgiven him because I am not looking for personal revenge but, rather, for justice in the broadest sense, so that in the future there will be no place for the perpetrators of such crimes in Syria or anywhere else in the world.

Therefore, in the spirit of attaining a minimum of justice, I demand that those who committed such crimes in Syria be held accountable – and the defendant is one of them. And regardless of how long he will be imprisoned, he will have a clock near him, he will see the sun and know when it rises and when it sets, he will have medical care when needed, and he will receive visits from relatives who will know how he is doing, just as he will know how they are doing.

I survived, but the same good fortune was not experienced by Mustafa Karman, Ayham Ghazoul, Rania al-Abbasi, her husband and six children, Nabil al-Sharbaji, Yahya al-Sharbaji, Bassel Khartabil, Islam al-Dabbas, Mohammed Arab, Ali Shihab, Ali Mustafa, and tens of thousands of people who deserve that we name them here one by one and tell their stories and those of the pain of their loved ones.

 

My name is Nouran.

I breathe very slowly and observe what is happening inside my head, at the moment when all the heads around me give the impression that they are awaiting my every word. Everything inside me prevents me from saying the word. It is not the appearance before the court and the justice system that causes difficulties for me but, rather, the beginning. Beginnings have been challenging for me for quite some time. Beginnings are usually exhausting.

I don’t know how to start or where to start!

Every day, from the first moments of waking up, I just think how I can escape from the beginning, from the beginning of the day, from the beginning of the rituals of waking up, from the beginning of work, education, obligations and considerations, and the daily contemplation of new, abstract faces devoid of any meaning.

Can you imagine having to start all over again with your entire life, when you are right in the middle of it? You have to start everything all over again from scratch! From zero, and practically from below zero, because you are in a foreign country, where everything is different from the country where you lived up until then – on the one hand. And on the other hand, the experiences, the convictions and the thoughts, as well as the society, which lived under the ruling regime, played the leading role in shaping who you are.

A way of life based on fear and terror and lack of security. The regime has made you believe that you are not even entitled to demand your rights.

In my practical and psychological life, I am starting again from zero. Imagine what effort and strength and strong will and inner peace you need for that!

And life? This life cannot be turned back!

I don’t want to be in the position of victim, and I don’t want to perceive myself in this way, because everyone is responsible for their own actions, regardless of the difficult circumstances they find themselves in during their lives.

But this does not change the fact that the political, social and dictatorial system has the lion’s share in forming or – more accurately – destroying, one’s personality. To be more precise: no one who belonged to these people living under the yoke of the regime had the opportunity to develop their personality.

I believe in justice. I believe in the significance of this trial and in the importance of the verdict that will be handed down, which will affect the future not only of Syria, but also society as a whole. Indeed, this is the first step of its kind since the start of the revolution up until this point.

It is my hope that the esteemed judges will take into account that this verdict has the power to change the lives of millions, depending on its outcome, alone due to its importance for the country and its people.

Esteemed Judges,

With full confidence in my lawyers who represented me in the trial, I have decided to speak to you in person today because this trial session is not a routine procedure for me and this day is not an ordinary day. Today is our day, we, the victims who, through this trial in this court, have been able for the first time to regain our agency to act and to take action against those who have deprived us of our liberty and against the crimes that have been committed against us.

I have chosen to speak before you today, despite the difficulty of this task, also out of a sense of responsibility towards all those who have gone through a similar painful experience as mine and do not have access to this court or any other similar legal body.

But primarily I speak today out of a sense of duty towards those who are still being held in the detention centers of the Assad regime and in all other prisons in Syria, those who do not know that we are standing here today and may never know.

On the one hand, my participation in this trial was a painful experience for me. I had to dig up a lot of memories that I have always tried to bury and forget forever, a matter that has had an enormous impact on my physical and mental health. At the beginning of the trial, I did not know what to think or expect from it. Today, however, I can say that this difficult experience has restored my faith in justice. Justice is not an illusion, but a necessity and could become a reality.

With this trial, the story of my arrest comes to an end. I used to tell people how I was arrested, deprived of my freedom, and how my rights were violated. Today I can continue to tell my story and say that I helped to bring one of those to justice who is guilty of this. Thus, I got back a part of my violated dignity.

Like many other Syrians, I lost hope for a very long time. My participation in this trial and my involvement in the many details of this trial, has restored my faith in the meaning and benefits of the fight for a more just world, and it has shown the possible viability of justice and change. By this, hope resuscitated in me that what has happened to us in Syria and what is still happening there every day is not the end.

I am saying all this today in full awareness that what I am trying to express here in emotions and words is my individual experience, and it may seem an illusion to millions of Syrians who have lost their faith in justice in the world. On the broad level, this trial might seem small, but on the personal level it means a lot to me. This trial might not seem a big step on a public level but it is on a personal level.

That is why I wish, and I will continue to strive for it with hope, that we will all experience the time when our capacity to act and our faith in the meaningfulness of our efforts will be restored. 

Esteemed Judges,

The defendant claims to have helped the prisoners. I say to you today that the very fact that we are here in this room in Germany, exiled from our country, is proof that neither the defendant nor any of his colleagues have provided us with any form of help, cooperation or empathy.

But if the defendant were to ask me today what outcome of this trial I hope to see, I would answer: I don’t want you to experience the horror I had to experience, and I don’t want you to sit and wait for a long time without knowing what will happen next. This is what burdened me the most during the days of my imprisonment.

But most of all, I do not wish for you to experience torture, to die under it, or to be detained and unlawfully imprisoned, as you and other criminals have done all this to me and to millions of Syrians many times. But indeed, I wish that this court gives you time, a lot of time, enough time to think about us, victims and witnesses, who have appeared here in this court. To think about the faces, voices and dreams of all those who have met you during the years of your work in the detention center. I wish you a lot of time to think about this, because I am convinced that you will not be able to escape these thoughts.

We Syrians have fought and are still fighting for the liberation of our country from an inhuman regime, for justice and the restoration of our dignity, and this is our right.

Justice, dignity and freedom are the fundamental rights of all people. What is happening here today must not remain a one-time event. It is not a generous gift from anyone. Rather, it is the human, legal, and state’s duty of every human being, of every judiciary, and of every state.

Lastly I believe that the verdict that this court will pronounce will not bring full justice to the Syrians, nor can it be seen as an alternative to a comprehensive and sustainable solution to the issue of detainees in Syrian prisons or to the Syrian conflict in general. But this verdict must be an urgent call to the German government and all governments around the world to take real action to save those still held in the regime’s dungeons and in its big prison called “Assad’s Syria.”

“What gives life its value is not the fact that we have experienced this life, but the difference we have brought to the lives of others. This gives meaning to our lives, which is what we strive for.” Nelson Mandela

Esteemed Judges, Honorable Public Prosecution, Honorable Lawyers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

595 days have passed since the beginning of these proceedings on 23 April 2020. 595 days of pleas and testimonies regarding events that have happened and are, unfortunately, still happening in the prisons and detention centers of the Syrian regime. 595 days of horrific details recounted by survivors of the ravages of oppression and tyranny under Bashar al-Assad and his henchmen. These survivors managed to escape and are now living in Europe, far away from the immediate dangers of the Syrian repressive apparatus. These are the details, which I also, in part, personally experienced and recounted in my testimony before your esteemed court on 19 August 2020.

Today and every day, I ask myself just how extensive the details are that we have not yet heard and will never hear because of the deaths of those people they were connected to, either as a result of direct torture and abuse, or due to poor sanitary conditions in the prisons. How many details have we not been able to obtain, because those who experienced them cannot share them with us, as they continue to live in the detention centers under the dominion of prison guards that behave as though they have the right to decide life and death?

Esteemed Judges, Honorable Public Prosecution, Honorable Lawyers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are here to witness the trial of the former colonel of the Syrian intelligence services, Anwar R, and as soon as these words are uttered, “a colonel in the intelligence services,” I feel the flash of a lingering, deep-seated fear. This fear has lived inside of us since we were children, as the crimes committed by intelligence officers in Syria span decades. Fear has crept into generations of Syrians as a result of the atrocities we have been told of by our closest friends and family members. Everyone speaks with a whisper because “the walls have ears,” as they say in Syria. If a single sentence reaches the ears of these officers that they do not approve of, the lives of both speaker and listener alike are no longer safe.

Torture in Syria, unfortunately, is not a new practice. It is a method of governance upon which successive regimes have been based since the 1950s until this very moment. Repressive regimes, including the Syrian regime under the rule of former President Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad, have become accustomed to responding to any opposition or political, social or economic demands with torture and violence, rejecting outright any dialogue or discussion. In Syria, political activity in society at large is equated with suicide because of the looming dangers that await those who seek to make a change, whatever that change may be. To a dictator, change is poisonous, and demanding it is an unforgivable crime, to which the only response is violence and bloodshed. This response comes at the hands of officers and intelligence agents who are well versed in the methods and instruments of torture and violence. They do it cold-bloodedly and will not hesitate to kill in order to preserve the dictator’s seat of power and their own positions in his system.

The charges against the accused, Anwar R, are just the tip of this dark iceberg. The killing of 58 people and the torture of more than 4,000 others, along with accusations of sexual assault and other chilling details that have caused those following the proceedings to shudder – this trial has demonstrated that, for months and years, this is what the defendant was doing. I urge you to also take into consideration that the harm caused by the accused was not limited to his immediate victims, but also extended to their families and friends. We are talking about 4,000 families who suffered as a result of the crimes of Anwar R, and all of this is documented. We are talking about a generation, if not generations, who suffered repression and the deprivation of rights as a result of what Anwar R has done to serve the machine of oppression in Syria.

What could possibly be a more severe crime than for someone to torture you, kill you, forcibly tear you away from your family, deprive you of any contact with them, or commit all of these acts simultaneously and systematically as a direct punishment for your attempt to demand what is rightfully yours?

Esteemed Judges, Honorable Public Prosecution, Honorable Lawyers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I stand before you today, demanding justice; I do not seek revenge or retribution. The Syria that I dream of and that I struggled and continue to struggle for must be based on the foundations of justice and the rule of law, not on violence, counter-violence, revenge and the law of the jungle. I do not claim to know what a just sentence should be for crimes of such magnitude committed by the accused, but I do know for sure that it will be the first judicial ruling against a Syrian intelligence officer that punishes him for his actions while he was on the job.

The trial of Anwar R will not put an end to the torment and suffering of the Syrians. Some of this ongoing suffering has been documented in the tenth annual report on enforced disappearances in Syria, issued by the Syrian Network for Human Rights on 30 August 2021. According to the report, there are 131,469 people still under arrest, in detention, or who have been subject to enforced disappearance by the Syrian regime from March 2011 until August 2021. 131,469 families await the verdict of your esteemed court.

The verdict is the result of a fair trial and legal procedures that have allowed the defendant to appoint lawyers to plead in his name and defend him, allowed him to communicate with the world beyond the confines of his prison, and which have taken the dignity of the accused into account, treating him as innocent until proven guilty. This all stands in complete contrast to everything that the defendant consciously did during his many years of service as an officer in the Syrian intelligence beginning in 1995 – especially in the light of the fact that he is also a graduate of the Faculty of Law.

Esteemed Judges, Honorable Public Prosecution, Honorable Lawyers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

As Syrians, we look forward to the day when our country, like other developed countries, will be a country that respects our rights and does not attack us. We look forward to the day when we are no longer treated in a manner that is not even remotely compatible with human rights. We look forward to a future in which torture and forced confession will not be condoned either politically or socially. We are tired of the intractable situation in Syria. For decades, our blood has been shed without anyone being held accountable. And now, with political discussions in many countries about restoring relations with this criminal regime, there is a deliberate and humiliating disregard for the suffering and struggles of Syrians who seek a better future that includes everyone. Your ruling is the first step on this long road: a ruling that conveys the clear and unambiguous message that criminals will, sooner or later, be held accountable; a ruling that respects human dignity and freedom as inviolable rights. While these principles may be self-evident in Germany and in many other countries, they are for me and for many Syrians still a dream that we strive for.

Your verdict, first and foremost, is a resounding condemnation of torture as a crime. Torture is a crime against humanity wherever it is committed, whether in Syria or in any other part of this world, and its condemnation is what we have been eagerly awaiting for many decades in my country. Yes, the road is long and will not end until the entire system is called before the courts, especially the head of the Syrian regime Bashar al-Assad, and the senior officers of his army and intelligence, as well as all criminals, on whichever side they may stand.

Esteemed Judges, Honorable Public Prosecution, Honorable Lawyers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of myself and many Syrians, including those who are still in Syria under the yoke of the regime and those who are in refugee camps at home or in neighboring countries, I would like to express my gratitude to you. I speak in the name of the many who had the wish and the courage to stand here before you and testify, but who never had this opportunity because they either drowned at sea or froze in the forests at the borders on their journey to reach a safe country, a journey which brought them immense suffering. This suffering can be seen explicitly in their treatment on these borders as criminals by those same people who were expected to help them as victims. This story does not belong to the Syrians alone. Repression is the enemy of humanity because it kills the most beautiful thing that makes us human: ambition. Injustice is the enemy of societies because it divides even siblings from one another. As the Arab poet Al-Mutanabbi in the 10th century said: “Injustice cuts ties between people, even if they were ties of blood.” I bow to the justice of your court and wish you strength and wisdom in reaching a just verdict.

Thank you.

Torture and severe deprivation of liberty in at least 4,000 cases; at least 30 counts of murder; three cases of sexual violence – the numbers that surfaced during the course of the 104th day of the trial were staggering and scarcely imaginable in a courtroom thousands of kilometers away from the scene of the crime in Syria. And yet, it is these very dimensions of a crime against humanity, established through 103 days of trial proceedings, that the Federal Public Prosecution now believes to be fully substantiated. Their comprehensive closing argument in the trial today against Anwar R summarized this conclusion.

“Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer be at home in the world.” With these words from concentration camp survivor Jean Améry, the public prosecution began its plea. They insisted that it was all the more important that the survivors know that they would not be abandoned in their suffering. The scale and character of this suffering was discussed in depth during the subsequent hours of the proceedings. The two prosecution representatives gave detailed descriptions of the events that they consider to be confirmed by the evidence.

With the onset of the demonstrations in March 2011, the Syrian military and intelligence service positioned themselves as central institutions in the suppression of the protests. In Damascus, Branch 251 of the Syrian General Intelligence Service played a crucial role in this. In its operations, the branch was supported by members of Subdivision 40, which also functioned as an independently run facility. As a rule, arrested demonstrators were promptly transferred to the al-Khatib prison. There, they were subjected to the so-called welcome party upon arrival, during which the guards beat the detainees with iron bars, cables and clubs. At least one prisoner died as a result of this abuse. During the ensuing searches in the basement of the facility, the detainees were forced to strip naked, and their subsequent detention took place within conditions that were clearly life-threatening. The windowless cells in the basement were so overcrowded that the prisoners regularly had to sleep standing up. There was scarcely enough air to breathe, and what little food the prisoners did receive was already spoiled. Toilet access was strictly rationed, and the stench of urine, feces and blood was unbearable. The prisoners were infested with fleas and lice, suffering from scabies and developing abscesses. In addition, there was the constant exposure to the pain of fellow prisoners and the screams of torture that penetrated the cell walls day and night.

“Even mere detention under these circumstances was permanent torture,” the public prosecutors said. However, most of the detainees had been individually interrogated and severely tortured several times during the course of their detention, and this not only included the use of electric shocks, but also beatings with cables and suspending the prisoners by their wrists. The Syrian regime had already used torture before the revolution, but after the protests began, this practice acquired a different quality and scale. From then on, the aim was not so much to obtain information as it was to “finish off” the dissidents. The prosecutors then vividly described the individual fates of more than twenty survivors, some of whom had appeared as witnesses and others as joint plaintiffs in the proceedings.

The statement then turned to the defendant and the most important stages of his career: studying law after graduating from high school; joining the police force in 1986; and being transferred in 1995 to the intelligence service at the age of 32, where he made a “career” in various departments. In September 2008, Anwar R finally assumed the position of head of the “interrogation” subdivision within Department 251, and by January 2011 at the latest, he became a colonel, receiving his own office on the 1st floor of the al-Khatib prison, along with another office in the basement of the building where the cells were located.

“The subdivision had a strict hierarchical structure,” the public prosecutors explained. The 30 to 40 subordinates would have followed the defendant’s orders, and throughout the entire period of criminal perpetration, the latter would have had full knowledge of the torture, detention conditions, and sexual assaults, as well as the deaths of prisoners that resulted from this abuse. With these claims, the prosecutors disputed the defendant’s statements to the contrary, rejecting them outright in the final analysis. The defense lawyers had argued that the defendant had already internally renounced the regime when the protests began and had provided assistance to the prisoners to the extent of his capabilities. For this reason, his superiors had already stripped him of his authority at the beginning of June 2011, allowing him to formally remain the head of the subdivision in name only until he was finally transferred to Branch 285 in September 2012.

The prosecution countered this: had the defendant actually rebelled against the regime, he himself would have been the victim of state repression or at least would have been demoted to a lower position. Instead, he participated in a high-level meeting at the Ministry of the Interior at the end of 2012 and, up until his reassignment, remained in a position to decide whether prisoners were to be tortured or released, as several witness statements confirmed.

The public prosecutors then provided detailed justifications of the case numbers mentioned at the beginning of the closing statement. Due to the fact that mere internment in the prison could already be considered torture, the prosecution estimated – to the benefit of the defendant – that “only” 4,000 cases of torture took place. As the defendant himself stated, there had always been at least 1,000 prisoners at any given time in al-Khatib since the beginning of the revolution. Even if many of the prisoners were actually imprisoned for a shorter period of time, an average internment of three months could be assumed. After subtracting the margin of error, the number of prisoners during the period of criminal perpetration was 4,000. The number of deaths was corroborated by several witness statements. To the benefit of the defendant, cases where it could not be ruled out that separate witness statements referred to the same corpse were treated as a singular case. Three cases of sexual violence were also confirmed.

According to the prosecutors, these acts should be treated as crimes against humanity. The fact that the defendant had acted in the official capacity of the state should not grant him immunity from prosecution. The court had already convincingly demonstrated in the verdict against Eyad A (see trial report day 60/2) that a systematic and widespread attack on a civilian population had taken place in Syria, and the 4,000 cases of torture and severe deprivation of liberty, the killings, as well as the sexual assaults had taken place in the context of this attack. In addition to a crime against humanity under the International Criminal Code, the accused was also guilty of 30 counts of murder, 26 counts of dangerous bodily harm, 14 counts of deprivation of liberty for more than a week, two counts of hostage-taking, and three counts of sexual abuse of prisoners under the German Criminal Code. Following this, the public prosecutors requested a life sentence, considering the exceptional gravity of guilt that had been established. Admittedly, it had to be taken into account in his favor that he had made a partial confession and had saved at least some individuals from the most severe torture. However, in light of the magnitude of the crimes and their grave consequences, his guilt should be nonetheless regarded as particularly substantial. Should the court uphold this assessment, the suspension of the prison sentence to probation would be ruled out even after 15 years of imprisonment.

On the 103rd day of the trial, the last witness in the proceedings testified before the Koblenz Higher Regional Court. But contrary to what the defense had planned, he was hardly able to contribute anything that might help exonerate the defendant. It became clear early on that the testimony of this man, a Syrian journalist who now lives in France as a political refugee, was mired in substantial contradictions.

The witness, who looked considerably older than the 33 years of age he stated, explained that he himself had been detained for one night in March 2012 at the al-Khatib Branch. He had likely been detained because he had been working as a journalist. However, he claimed to have been treated unusually leniently: his interrogations in the prison had been relatively short, he had been allowed to use the toilet, and he had hardly been beaten. One interrogation had been conducted by the defendant himself, and the witness had perceived him to be an educated, cultured man.

However, the more the witness testified, the more confused he appeared to be. Thus, he repeatedly contradicted himself, even in consecutive sentences: “We were beaten. No, we were not beaten.” In addition, he answered evasively to questions from the presiding judge. When questioned about important or well-known buildings near the al-Khatib prison, he failed to state that there was a hospital next to the facility, which many other survivors had reported. Nor could he accurately describe where the defendant’s office was located within the detention center, even though, by his own admission, he had not been blindfolded – either on the way to or within the detention center.

This raised the question for the others present in the courtroom: is the witness lying? And if so, why? Could he have been pressured by the defendant’s family or even paid off? Even if these questions could not be answered that day, an uncomfortable feeling nonetheless remained.

After the questioning of the witness, the Senate proceeded to read out several translations of documents, such as the curriculum vitae of Anwar R, two written documents with the signature of the defendant, along with evidence from the French police.

Subsequently, by mutual agreement of all parties, the proceedings were concluded. The closing statements by the participants in the trial will be presented in the coming weeks, beginning with the statement by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office the following day.

The 102nd day of the trial in Koblenz began with the testimony of an interrogator from the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). He recalled the testimony of a Syrian doctor whom he had interviewed as a witness during the preliminary investigation. The doctor remained anonymous out of concern for her relatives who still live in Syria. 

According to the BKA official, the doctor had reported the following: she had worked in Damascus at the Red Crescent Hospital, which was located in the immediate vicinity of the al-Khatib Branch. From the beginning of the conflict in 2011 until mid-2012, intelligence officers had brought injured prisoners to the hospital for treatment. She claimed that she personally saw roughly 15 to 20 detainees during that period, all of whom suffered from malnutrition and exhibited signs of torture. According to her testimony, there were often extensive bruises and abrasions on the wrists, indicating the possible use of restraints. She did not herself see any deceased prisoners, but had heard of several deaths. Kidney failure was likely the most common cause of their deaths, which could have been prevented by more-timely medical treatment. As of summer 2012, no more prisoners were admitted to the hospital, because from that point forward, some of the hospital staff had been deployed directly on-site within the al-Khatib Branch.  

Following the questioning of the BKA official, the court issued a total of six orders denying requests by the defense to summon and question witnesses. The requests stated that the specified individuals would supposedly be able to testify, among other things, that the defendant did not have any executive or organizational authority in the al-Khatib Branch. The court based its rejection partially on the lack of specificity of the requests and partially on the inaccessibility of the witnesses living abroad. In addition, no significant new findings could be expected from this, in particular because several of the named witnesses were only supposed to testify to events before or after the alleged crime had taken place. Furthermore, the defendant’s inner attitude of rejection towards the torture system was in any case irrelevant to the decision regarding his criminal liability, unless it had been visibly evident. The expense of summoning the witnesses would thus be disproportionate to the probable evidentiary value of the testimony, according to the Senate. 

The trial will continue on 1 December. On that day, the closing remarks will not yet take place, the chairwoman said. However, this means that the public prosecutors could still begin their closing remarks on 2 December.

The witness who testified on the 101st day of the trial wished to remain anonymous. The reason: his brother was known in Syria as a human rights defender and was likely in the hands of the regime, which meant that revealing his own identity could put his brother in great danger. Presumably for this same reason, the witness’s lawyer withdrew his application for admission as a joint plaintiff at the beginning of the trial day. 

Within his testimony, the witness recounted his experiences in prison: he had been arrested in his store in April 2012. Roughly 20 individuals had brought him to a vehicle at gunpoint and blindfolded him with a T-shirt. They drove to Subdivision 40, which he recognized because he had already been detained there in 2006 and 2007. Upon his arrival there, they interrogated and severely abused him, the witness said. Because of his resulting injuries, he said, he was transferred that same evening to the Harasta Military Hospital, where he encountered other fellow prisoners who had also been abused.   

To his surprise, he was told after two days that he would be released from the hospital. However, his hope quickly vanished into thin air, the witness said. He said he was transported by car through the city, but instead of being set free, he was forced to put on a blindfold at a checkpoint and was taken to Branch 251, the al-Khatib prison. There, he claimed, he was beaten as soon as he was brought in, to which the witness commented, “We don’t need to talk about the welcome party – that’s common knowledge.” Later, according to his testimony, he was put in an overcrowded cell whose windows faced the other cell wings. As a result, he and his fellow prisoners frequently heard the cries of other prisoners being tortured. The witness stated that he had been detained in the cell with roughly 200 other people, including a man who had been arrested with his 15- or 16-year-old son. The prison guards had tortured the son in front of his father and vice versa, he said. 

The witness reported that he himself had been interrogated and severely tortured about four times. He had been falsely accused of being the leader of a gang whose goal was to kidnap Syrian security forces. However, he refused to confess, knowing that this would only make things worse. The prison guards proceeded to beat him with a cable and then strung him up by his hands. He recounted that everyone who walked by insulted, spat at, and abused him, including with targeted blows to his genitals. After several such brutal interrogations, he said, he was finally released through the mediation of a middleman whom his family had paid by signing over a plot of land to him.   

In conclusion, the witness relayed how he had identified the defendant. After his release, he had returned to Branch 251 accompanied by the middleman to reclaim his car, which the security forces had confiscated. They had gone to the defendant’s office, and the middleman then spoke to him. The witness described that he immediately recognized the defendant’s voice from one of his interrogations. After leaving the prison complex, the middleman told him that the interlocutor with the familiar voice had been the prison director.

The man who testified on day 100 of the al-Khatib trial was summoned at the request of the defense. He is now a Swedish citizen. It reported that he had been active in the Syrian opposition until 2013. The defense lawyers had hoped that the trained doctor could provide evidence to exonerate the defendant, but it quickly became clear to those present in the courtroom that this was unlikely to occur.

Because of his activities in the opposition, the witness had himself been arrested several times by the regime and, according to his own statements, spent ten years of his life in Syrian prisons. Although he had never been to the al-Khatib Branch, he was familiar with the stories that people had told about the prison. In 2011, the 64-year-old left the country and fled to Jordan. However, he continued to work for the opposition and was responsible for helping officers flee the country. In this context, he met Anwar R in 2013, who told him that he had left Syria for health reasons and out of fear for his family’s safety. The witness’ goal while abroad had been to develop a kind of “counter-intelligence service” with high-ranking officers who had defected. However, due to lack of both political and financial support, he left the opposition in 2013.

During his questioning, the participants in the trial, as well as the visitors in the courtroom, became increasingly disconcerted: the witness’s statements seemed incoherent and, at times, confused. He accused the West, Jordan, and Turkey of having an interest in Syria’s disintegration and, therefore, of not giving the opposition any support. He boycotted the Syria conference in Geneva because he did not want to enter into negotiations with the regime; in any case, he claimed, everything there was staged. In fact, the witness continued, the German secret service was calling the shots in Syria.

During the questioning, it also remained unclear where the witness had gotten his information from, e.g., regarding the command structures within the intelligence services. Several times, the witness laughed out loud as he recounted his arrests and detentions, and when asked about specific facts, he answered evasively and in a circuitous manner. All in all, many questions remained unanswered at the end of the three-hour hearing.

The 99th day of the al-Khatib trial at the Koblenz Higher Regional Court was brief and included the questioning of one witness and two statements by the public prosecutors regarding motions made by the defense. A journalist was also present among the visitors, who made use of the translation of the proceedings into Arabic.

The witness who testified that day had been called by the defense. He was an acquaintance and former colleague of the accused. In 1992, the witness had completed a one-year training course at the Syrian police academy together with Anwar R. After this training period, R was subsequently employed by the intelligence services while the witness worked at the Ministry of the Interior, most recently as a colonel, until he left Syria at the end of 2012. According to the witness’ testimony, he and Anwar R had in the meantime spoken regularly on the phone, and they had done each other one or two favors. Beyond that, however, they were not involved in each other’s affairs. The witness claimed that in spring 2002, he had contacted Anwar R when one of his relatives had been arrested by the intelligence service. Shortly after the witness had asked R to assist in his relative’s release, the latter was indeed set free.

The witness then spoke about Anwar R’s desertion: in November 2012, there had been a meeting of high-ranking intelligence officers at the Syrian Ministry of the Interior, which Anwar R and the witness had also attended. Afterwards, the two had spoken privately in the witness’ office. In this conversation on 29 November, Anwar R spoke out against the Syrian regime and confided to him that he wanted to leave Syria. The reason for this was that he was under psychological pressure from his work, especially because Hafez Makhlouf, the head of the general intelligence service and cousin of President Bashar al-Assad, had complete authority over him.

The witness reported that, at the time, he himself was all set to leave Syria two days later. According to him, he provided Anwar R with a contact in Jordan and thus helped R and his family flee from Syria two weeks later. However, Anwar R’s escape had proven to be more difficult than his own: the witness explained that R, as an officer, was under more intense scrutiny by the government. Also, R did not live in a region bordering Jordan, as the witness did, which likely made his escape more challenging. 

The witness said several times that Anwar R had worked in the al-Khatib Branch until his departure. When asked whether it was Department 285 to which Anwar R had been transferred in September 2012, a claim that was made in several other witnesses’ testimonies, the witness said he could not remember for certain. 

Finally, the public prosecutors made statements on two motions filed by the defense. They argued against the hearing of further witnesses called by the defense, contending that such further testimony would not bring any new insights. In the course of subsequent statements made by some trial participants, a brief discussion took place emphasizing the fact that the defense was filing multiple motions at such a late stage in the trial. The court will continue to address these motions in the coming weeks. A verdict is, therefore, not to be expected before mid-December. Depending on how the Senate deals with the defense’s motions − and on whether or not further motions are granted − an additional delay is also quite possible.   

The trial proceedings scheduled for 10 November were cancelled, so the 100th day of the trial will be the 11 November.  

These days, it is gradually becoming more apparent that the al-Khatib trial at the Koblenz Higher Regional Court is approaching its end. For the session on day 97, in contrast to the usual practice in recent months, no witnesses had been summoned in advance. On this day, the central question was whether the defense still wanted to submit motions, and which ones. After the lawyers announced that they wanted to discuss this again with the defendant, it was clear that the session would not last long. Subsequently, the public prosecutors only briefly commented on a motion filed the previous week, and then the session, after only 30 minutes, was closed for the day.

On the following day, the defense was prepared: it submitted eight additional motions. The aim was to hear new witnesses who could help exonerate the defendant, including a former colonel who worked for the Syrian regime and a brigadier general. The public prosecutors indicated that they would state their position on this matter before the next scheduled sessions. In the coming weeks, it will become clear to what extent the court will grant the requests and hear further witnesses.

During trial day 96, additional testimony from an insider witness was heard. He had worked in Intelligence Security Branch 285 from 1983 until he defected at the end of 2012. There, he handled administrative work such as mail delivery.

The witness first met Anwar R in Branch 285 in the mid-1980s. At the time, the accused was lieutenant colonel. In the following years, R was promoted and eventually sent to Branch 251. The witness only got in contact again with R when he returned to Branch 285 years later. During that time, their relationship was limited to respectful, superficial greetings, as Anwar R was an officer of higher rank.

A significant portion of the questioning revolved around the issue as to whether the witness knew why Anwar R was sent back to Branch 285. R stated earlier in the trial that he had fallen into disgrace and, as a result, was sent back to that department as a form of punishment. But the witness’s response was unclear. He stated that as a lower ranking employee, he had no insights into the relationships of the high-ranking officers. At the same time, however, R appeared to have had a leadership role.

The witness also conveyed that from his point of view, the accused was put into the same position – head of the Interrogation Division – that he held prior to his transfer to Branch 251, the al-Khatib prison. He also appeared to have the same power and status, including an official car, his own office, and at least 25 people working for him.

During the course of the testimony, Anwar R’s transfer back to Branch 285 seemed less and less like a type of demotion or punishment. Also, when the witness was asked whether he knew what would happen in cases where the regime doubted the loyalty of an officer, he stated that the officer in question would at least be interrogated and subjected to legal or disciplinary proceedings. Dismissal from his job or even imprisonment could also be a potential consequence of this.

In addition, the insider witness testified on the relationship between Branches 285 and 251, with Branch 251 being more influential as it included Division 40, which was headed by Hafez Makhlouf, Bashar al-Assad’s cousin. The witness stated that both branches would often request detainees from the other branch to complete certain investigations. His testimony also included descriptions of the structures and working routines within Branch 285.

It was conspicuous that during the proceedings, the witness used the words “us” and “we” when speaking of the security services. Likewise, he spoke of “events,” while other witnesses had earlier used the terms “revolution” or “uprising.” Previously, other witnesses had indicated that the use of this terminology suggested a certain political orientation (see day 83).

As is often the case in criminal trials in Germany, the defense lawyers tend to become more active when the trial is winding down, attempting to bring additional evidence in support of their clients to the case. This has also happened in Koblenz in recent weeks. Anwar R’s defense lawyers filed requests to bring additional witnesses into the trial that might provide information regarding R’s motivation to defect and his pre-existing “inner opposition” to the Syrian regime.

The court has acted upon some of these motions, calling on the respective witnesses to testify if they were currently within the boundaries of the European Union and had agreed to voluntarily appear in the Koblenz court. For witnesses outside of the EU, the court denied such motions. It argued: given the relatively limited information these witnesses could potentially provide about the crimes, it was not justified to summon them, considering that the necessary transnational legal assistance would delay the trial for months.

Trial day 95 therefore started with the court rejecting some of these motions made by the defense lawyers. Then, a witness, who was called to appear following one of the defense’s motions, was heard. Witness T was a high-ranking military pilot until he defected in May 2012. He then entered Jordan in July 2012 and provided voluntary assistance to the Jordanian military intelligence, including providing information about and verifying the identities of defectors coming from Syria. T stated that he belonged to a family of military men that in the past was affiliated with the Syrian regime. Not without pride, he mentioned that he knew Bashar al-Assad personally.

In Jordan, the witness learned through mutual friends that Anwar R was planning to defect. T then met R in late 2012 when the accused entered Jordan after his defection. He received Anwar R at Al-Mafraq city in Jordan near the Syrian-Jordanian border. There, the Jordanian military intelligence interrogated R – a process that, according to T, every defector entering Jordan was subjected to. At that time, Jordan had military and security concerns because of the large number of Syrian refugees entering the country. The interrogation was aimed at preventing spies and agents from the Syrian regime from entering Jordan. T stated that he had previously informed the Jordanian intelligence service about R’s possible defection and his desire to help him. He also assisted R in finding accommodation and reuniting with his family.

The witness also told the court that R spoke about the ongoing violence and torture in Syria and also about how he was psychologically exhausted. The witness stated that torture had already been used in Syria before 2011, but that this form of torture was employed to “extract the truth,” whereas after 2011 torture was used for the purposes of intimidation and revenge – a differentiation between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” torture which many spectators of the trial found to be disconcerting.

The witness further testified that Anwar R had mentioned to him that he was under surveillance by Tawfiq Younes, Hafez Makhlouf, and others before his defection. R had also cooperated with the Jordanian authorities by sharing information to help Syrian civilians to come safely to Jordan.

The court also asked the witness about how one’s religious sectarian affiliation (Sunni/Alawite) affected a person’s status and professional standing. He was then questioned about other regime officials who had defected, including a close family member. The witness provided information about this individual, along with the relevant contact details, to the court.

They day ended as it had begun with some court decisions on motions to add further evidence to the case; they were mostly denied. Additionally, a legal notice informed the accused that more cases of murder had been added to the indictment, based on evidence the court had recently heard, for example, in the testimony given by a survivor on day 86.

However, the day ended with a huge disappointment for survivors of the Syrian regime: the court decided that the motion to include the crime of forced disappearance in the trial, filed by ECCHR’s partner lawyers, was not be granted. This means that one of the most emblematic crimes of the Syrian security services will not be explicitly included as such in the expected judgment.

The 94th day of the trial was limited to the brief questioning of witnesses and a statement by the Federal Prosecution on the motions made by the defense.

The witness called by the defense is an acquaintance of the accused Anwar R, as well as the ex-brother-in-law of one of the joint plaintiffs. When asked by the court, he recounted that he too had been arrested in 2012: the Syrian secret service had arrested him at the end of Ramadan during a vehicle inspection at a checkpoint in Damascus. It may have been a mix-up of names, as he was unaware of any other reason for his arrest. Intelligence officers questioned him for one to two hours at the police station and accused him of smuggling weapons. In the meantime, his father, who had found out about the arrest, had contacted Anwar R. The latter had contacted the head of the other intelligence department by telephone and, with his call, had obtained the witness’s immediate release. When asked, the witness explained that his family was friends with the accused. They had met in 2002 as neighbors in the same building in Damascus.

The witness was then questioned about his knowledge of the detention of his ex-sister-in-law. In particular, he was asked to answer whether and how Anwar R was discussed in the family of the joint plaintiff. The witness was unable to provide any information on this. He had only met the joint plaintiff in 2014, and as it had been some time since her imprisonment, her experiences in prison were not discussed.

The defense’s goal was probably thwarted by calling this witness. Rather, the witness’ testimony demonstrated: Anwar R was so influential that, even at a time when, according to his own statements, his superiors had already stripped of him of his powers, he was able to convince another intelligence department to release a prisoner with a single phone call.

Finally, the Public Prosecutor’s Office made a statement on two motions filed by the defense. The defense had requested that two witnesses who were currently abroad be questioned. They were to provide information about the accused’s escape plans at the time and his powerlessness in the face of the activities of Subdivision 40. The prosecution made it clear that both circumstances were irrelevant to the criminal charges. Only Anwar R’s behavior as head of Branch 251 was relevant, and accordingly, the requests should be rejected.

Day 93 of the al-Khatib trial lasted until early afternoon.. Initially, a police official from Berlin was summoned to provide clarification regarding a witness statement from August. In court, the witness had deviated from his original statement given during the investigation regarding the question when he had first been shown a photo of the defendant Anwar R. The court also questioned the official about the general conditions under which the witness had been questioned by the regional criminal investigation department at that time. 

Then, the defense’s request was complied with to examine a current map from Google Maps, in order to give an impression of the route taken by a witness to the al-Khatib branch in 2011. This was followed by the reading of two additional requests for evidence by the defense: they would like the court to summon two further witnesses from outside of Europe, whom they hope will testify positively in regard to their client.

They may have had similar hopes regarding the witness A, whose examination the lawyers had requested and which formed the main portion of the trial that day.  A is a well-known Syrian author and journalist. He gave a detailed account of how he was detained by the regime's security forces, stating that he was first apprehended by security forces on 3 February 2011, before a planned demonstration. After he was released shortly after that same evening, he was detained again on 4 February 2011 and was held at al-Khatib until 11 or 12 February 2011. A explained that his brief detention was due to his notoriety. He speculated that the regime, shortly after the beginning of the first protests, wanted to avoid further turmoil among the population. Upon his discharge, he was told that he was being released on the orders of President Bashar Al-Assad. He was treated far less brutally than other detainees and likely escaped the worst torture due to his prominence. He also initially portrayed the defendant in a positive light, reporting that the latter had not treated him badly. The witness added that he considered Anwar R to be an educated person. However, A reported, he was also mistreated by the guards at every opportunity. When asked about the general conditions in the ward, A, like other witnesses before him, vividly described the cruelty and inhuman practices within the ward. Among other things, A described the most severe physical abuse, during which some participants in and spectators of the trial, who had already heard about a great deal of cruelty in the past year and a half, let out horrified groans in response to this particularly dehumanizing torture. What was said made that much more of an impression because the witness had previously spoken quite positively about the defendant. 

A went on to say that the secret services had been a central instrument of state repression for as long as he could remember, describing them as “the brains” of the authoritarian regime. Al-Khatib had always been a place notorious for cuelty. On two occasions there, the witness encountered Anwar R. During the course of his testimony, A stated that the accused had certainly been informed of all the events which took place within the branch and had not come to occupy his position for no reason. 

Another subject of the testimony focused on meetings between A and Anwar R outside of al-Khatib. At the end of 2012, when the defendant had already deserted and left Syria, the latter had contacted A through an acquaintance of his from Jordan. After this, several meetings took place. After Anwar R had already been granted asylum status in Germany, a meeting took place in the border region between Turkey and Syria. At these meetings, Anwar R claimed that he was being pursued by Syrian security forces - a statement of which A did not seem convinced. The witness also said that he had asked the defendant several times to speak with him, as well as publicly, about his time in the intelligence service and, in particular, to reveal his knowledge. Anwar R had always refused and said that he wanted to one day write a book about it, hoping for A's help. According to A, contact with Anwar R broke off after that. Only in court did they meet again. The defendant's family had established contact with the defense attorneys.

The trial will be continued on October 6, 2021, and will remain in room 128 of the Koblenz Regional Court.

Day 92 of the al-Khatib trial was a comparatively short day, with the public portion of the proceedings lasting just under two hours. Back in room 128 of the regional court where the trial had taken place during the first months, another officer of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) testified, as was also the case on the 91st day of the trial on 9 September. During the investigations, this officer had questioned a former detainee of the al-Khatib Branch from abroad who now did not want to testify in court, as he feared for his family’s safety. 

The witness K, who was questioned in 2018, was a long-time political activist who had begun campaigning for the democratization of Syria before the onset of the civil war. He was arrested several times between 2011 and 2014 and detained at al-Khatib and other detention centers. His initial internment at the al-Khatib Branch in 2011 lasted between 35 and 45 days. He was detained there again between the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2014 for up to six months before being transferred to Branch 285. He spent his detention inside a collective cell with up to 40 other detainees. There was not even enough space for the inmates to lie down to sleep. Ultimately, he was released after paying bribes and was able to flee Syria. The main subject of interest during his questioning was his first period of detention in 2011.

During his deposition to the BKA, the witness stated that he had never seen Anwar R in person, nor had he been questioned or tortured by him. However, he told the German officials that he was familiar with Anwar R’s name and role through conversations with other prisoners. Anwar R was described by them as a “brutal monster” and when another detainee was taken away for questioning, his cellmates prayed that he would not be taken to R. The witness was also able to provide information about the structure of the prison facility and the hierarchies within the branch. K described the physical harm inflicted upon him as comparatively mild. He recounted being beaten and kicked during his first detention in the al-Khatib facility, also within the corridors of the detention center. The BKA official described this as the “classic welcome party.” K stated that he did not perceive the physical abuse he experienced as torture because it was less severe in comparison to his later detentions.

The ubiquitous “psychological torture” was worse during this first detention. K described to the investigating officer how screams from other prisoners could be heard “around the clock.” Guards regularly came into the cell to spray the detainees with water and arbitrarily beat them. Since no blindfolds were worn in the collective cell, he could see the marks of this brutal abuse. The bodies of other prisoners were “green and blue from top to bottom.” K also witnessed prisoners being stripped down to their undergarments and hung by their wrists or beaten with hoses and cables. The use of electric shocks could also be heard. 

After the questioning of the BKA official, the representatives of the Federal Public Prosecutor (GBA) and a representative of the joint plaintiffs commented on motions put forth by the defense. On day 91 of the trial, the defense had requested that further evidence – allegedly in favor of the accused – be included in the trial. The GBA and the representative of the plaintiffs rejected this request. Furthermore, a supplementary expert opinion regarding Syrian criminal law from the Max Planck Institute was presented and added to the minutes of the hearing as an appendix. After that, the court excluded the public in order to discuss the planning of the upcoming trial dates.

Day 91 of the al-Khatib trial extended into the afternoon. First, an officer of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) testified. This officer had previously questioned two witnesses and survivors of the al-Khatib branch from abroad who did not want to testify in court. 

The officer reported that one of the witnesses was unsure from the outset whether he wanted to testify. His fear for his family in Syria was too great. The second witness, Y H, approached the German authorities on his own initiative after seeing pictures of Anwar R on the news. Y H immediately recognized R because he was present during Y H’s interrogation and torture. R did not torture the witness himself but had been sitting on the sofa next to another officer. Yet, the other torturers had shown no mercy. During the interrogation, the witness had to watch video recordings of a demonstration in Damascus at which he was present and was subsequently ordered to identify other participants. Due to these circumstances, the witness was not blindfolded and, thus, was able to see the accused. When asked whether R himself had ordered the torture, the witness replied that orders had been given to stop the torture if the witness wanted to reveal a name.

The BKA officer’s testimony was followed by a statement from a Syrian physician who examined individuals detained at the al-Khatib Branch. He wore a wig, sunglasses, and a medical mask to disguise his identity in court. It was impressive that the witness did not testify in Arabic but, instead, in almost accent-free German. At the time of the crime, he had been a practicing medical doctor in the hospital next to the al-Khatib detention center. On several occasions, he and his colleagues were brought in to examine the detainees. Due to the fact that he was not allowed to treat any of the detainees, his medical consultations did not take place for health care reasons. He was only supposed to diagnose the cases and prescribe medication. He could not testify as to whether the detainees had actually received treatment. He reported on the catastrophic conditions in which the prisoners at al-Khatib were forced to live; some detainees had open wounds, broken bones, pneumonia, and other chronic diseases. 

The doctor was convinced that many inmates would face death without stationary treatment at a hospital. The doctor did not witness any corpses in the facility itself; however, he did report that one day the prison staff drove to the hospital with a box wagon full of corpses. The witness was asked to verify these deaths, but he was not allowed to issue cause of death or official death certificates. According to the witness, an examination to determine the cause of their deaths would have been unnecessary because “they looked very bad.” 

After the start of the revolution in Syria, the physicians and staff at the hospital where the witness worked no longer had access to the hospital’s mortuary; only staff from the al-Khatib Branch had access to these facilities. This meant that the physicians could not provide a place in the cooling rooms for people who died in the hospital, meaning that their relatives had to take the dead with them immediately. He stated that the cooling rooms must have been overcrowded with corpses, therefore the refrigeration was not working and in the summer there was a terrible smell.

After this testimony, the Senate admitted the witness from the previous day as a joint plaintiff in the proceedings and gave him the opportunity to speak about the system of forced disappearances in Syria. The regime in Syria was rarely willing to release information about the fate of its detainees.  When information was provided, it was not “free.” Families had to pay a lot of money for information about their disappeared relatives, the witness testified. He explained that forced disappearances were not only used to intimidate the population, but also were an essential source of income for the Assad regime’s collaborators. 

His lawyer had summoned today’s witness as he wanted to be admitted to the trial as a joint plaintiff. He previously had not testified at the German Federal Criminal Police, so that even those involved in the trial did not know what Dr A H, a Syrian mental health professional, had experienced. He began his testimony with "Bismillah Alrahman Alrahiem", Arabic for "in the name of God", and told of his time in al-Khatib in September 2011. An employee of the al-Khatib branch pretended to be a patient. While talking to the man, other officers of the al-Khatib branch entered the doctor’s office and forcibly detained the witness. His detention in al-Khatib lasted 40 days, almost all of which he spent in solitary confinement. He tried to communicate with other prisoners through a small window in the door of his cell. There were days when the witness turned to the guards, although he knew that this would almost certainly result in him being abused –but he was willing to endure this in order to escape the unbearable loneliness of his solitary cell. At times, he considered suicide. 

Like almost all former detainees in al-Khatib, A H spoke about the poor conditions. Due to the miserable food, he lost 20 kilograms during his detention. He could barely recognize himself in the mirror when he later arrived in the Adra prison.

The witness stated that he was interrogated more than ten times. Each time he was beaten on his feet with a stick when saying something the interrogator did not like. He was often confronted with the statements of other prisoners and had to watch them being beaten. 

When asked whether he had experienced sexual violence in detention, the witness answered "No, not myself". Instead, he reported about a large number of women who visited his practice because they had faced sexual violence in the detention centers. His professional assessment: These traumatic experiences can have a strong impact on the brain, even changing the personality of those affected. "When a person leaves prison, they sometimes are a completely different person. When a wife, a husband or the children want to receive their loved ones, they are confronted with a person who is completely different from before. The traces of torture do not only remain with the detainees themselves and their relatives, they persist over several generations". For women, the consequences are even more serious than for men, precisely because they are often victims of sexual violence in facilities of the intelligence services: "Men are celebrated as heroes when they are imprisoned and then released, while women are disowned by their husbands and excluded from their families or even become victims of honor killings."

After the judge dismissed the witness, Patrick Kroker, Sebastian Scharmer and René Bahns, lawyers of some of the joint plaintiffs and ECCHR’s partner lawyers, read out a statement on the prosecution's statement regarding the issue of enforced disappearances (see day 84). Among other things, they emphasized, that the Federal Prosecutor's Office’s view that the Assad regime did not intend to make people disappear could not be upheld. This clearly contradicts numerous testimonies made in Koblenz and many reports on the situation in Syria.

On day 89 of the al-Khatib trial, an artist was invited to the court whom many Syrians know. To protect him and his family in Syria, he was allowed to testify anonymously. His testimony was particularly important because he had been personally questioned by defendant Anwar R in December 2011.

The witness described his situation as follows: one day, security officers had come to his apartment and taken him away, under the pretext that they would only ask him something briefly. He was then detained for about three days in the al-Khatib Branch. During this time, he was questioned three times, and twice he encountered Anwar R. The latter had conducted the witness’ first interrogation in his own office, during which the witness had to wear a blindfold the entire time. It was true that the witness had been treated exceptionally mildly. He had not been beaten or tortured, but he had experienced the pervasive psychological violence at al-Khatib for the entire time. During his interrogation, for example, he frequently heard screams from other prisoners – Anwar R must also have heard them, they were so loud.

The conversation with Anwar R, according to the witness, was not particularly aggressive, but he was nevertheless constantly afraid of being beaten. When R asked him why he was afraid, the artist replied, “Because I am in a place that scares me.” Anwar R then assured him that he had nothing to fear. After all, the artist was not “scum” like the other demonstrators.

R asked the witness again and again, “Why did you do that, you are a well-known artist.” He was referring to a funeral service for 16 young people who had been killed, which the witness had attended. The artist refused to answer this question. The interrogation had gone on for about one to two hours. During this time he had to wear a blindfold, but was allowed to sit down.

Later, the witness was questioned one more time and had to sign a kind of apology before he was released. To prove the power of the intelligence services, the witness said, his father had been asked to pick him up in al-Khatib. Anwar R had taken him personally and without a blindfold to his father, who had been sitting in the office of the head of the department, Tawfiq Younis. There R had then introduced himself by name, which is why the witness only learned who his interrogator had been. When asked why he had received this special treatment, the witness replied that it must have been because his father had also been a famous artist. Anwar R had wanted to get to know him and had expressed admiration for both the father’s and the witness’ work. Respect toward them, however, was not expressed, he said. “They don’t respect anyone.”

The artist explained that he assumed that there were two to three fixed hours every day when torture took place in the department. He had also noticed that Anwar R was addressed with the respectful sidi, Master, he said. “It was obvious that he gave orders, which were then carried out,” the witness said. He himself was treated better than most of the other prisoners, he said, but “something good in the human sense of the word” did not exist in al-Khatib.

After the witness had fled to Europe, he had heard at some point that Anwar R had deserted and was in Germany. He had agreed that contact with R would be established. The witness said he had been curious to meet the colonel from the al-Khatib Branch under different circumstances and to learn why he had fled. They had then exchanged voice messages via WhatsApp from time to time and arranged to meet for coffee in case the witness visited Berlin. However, this never happened. Anwar R was arrested beforehand, so they only saw each other again in the courtroom in Koblenz.

On day 88 of the trial, a longtime critic of the Syrian regime testified. He was the last joint plaintiff represented by ECCHR’s partner lawyers in the trial. Witness A organized demonstrations against the government of Bashar al-Assad in 2011 and was arrested during a raid in his suburb.  Along with 100-150 other people, including old men and youths, he was forced onto a bus and taken to the al-Khatib detention center. Even on the ride, they were beaten and kicked. “These are memories you would rather forget,” the man said.

The witness testified that he was detained in an overcrowded cell in al-Khatib for about three to five days. During these days, he was interrogated twice, which meant that he was tortured, beaten with electric cables on his back and the soles of his feet in order to get the names of his friends and other regime critics out of him. After the beatings, he was forced to stand up and jump on his aching feet, then he had to lie down again, was beaten and had to stand up – again and again.

Back in his cell, he heard the screams of other prisoners outside his door and through the walls. When asked if he had seen any injuries on the men in his cell, he said, “Everyone was beaten.” However, he recalled one situation in particular, where a father was beaten in the presence of his son. This, he said, was something special.

His family had not known where he had been the whole time, he said. Through a sign that read “Al-Khatib Laboratory for Medical Analysis,” he said, he deduced for himself where he was. Other prisoners in his cell, some of whom had already been detained longer, confirmed this assumption.

When a judge asked the witness whether he had seen the defendant Anwar R in the department, the man answered in the negative. The judge then asked him to look at the dock, but A said he did not want to look there. In any case, he said, he had not been able to see anything in al-Khatib because he had almost always worn a blindfold.

A’s testimony ended early that day. The witness’s ability to differentiate well between detailed and fuzzy memories and to express this in such a way lent his testimony a special credibility and impressed many present.

Day 87 of the al-Khatib trial began with the questioning of joint plaintiff H. The man had been a student – first in Lebanon, then in Syria – and had been sitting in a park with friends when he was arrested in the summer of 2012.

He and the others were taken to Branch 40 of the Syrian General Intelligence Service. H was accused of frequently traveling in and out of Lebanon to obtain medical equipment for mobile hospitals. When H denied the accusations, they beat him until he fell to the ground. He was then taken to al-Khatib, where he was placed in a communal cell of about 20 square meters which already contained over 100 people. H knew about ten of the fellow prisoners, they all told him of their massive torture and mistreatment.

H described the miserable detention conditions in al-Khatib: the screams of the tortured could be heard constantly in the cell. There was never enough food, air or space. All detainees were severely punished for smuggling a single bar of soap into the cell. Diseases such as scabies were common, and injuries did not receive medical attention. The saying circulated among the prisoners, to “Rather die before you ask for medicine.”

During his interrogation, H was asked to name doctors or journalists with whom he allegedly cooperated. Because he could not give names, he was threatened and beaten with a rifle butt until he became unconscious. He was then placed on a chair and given ten minutes to write names on a piece of paper, which was followed by further abuse. Subsequently, H had to sign several papers, the contents of which he did not know.

After about eight days, H was transferred to another section: busses were waiting for the prisoners in front of the al-Khatib Branch, next to them stood four officers, one of them a neighbor of the witness. Among them was also a man whom H believed with a high degree of probability that he recognized him from the photograph presented to him by the German police and who could be Anwar R.

After the end of the testimony, the Koblenz court announced a decision on the motion filed by the defense in June 2021 to include the files of the so-called structural investigation proceedings on Syria, which are being conducted by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office. These files contain almost all investigations into crimes against humanity in Syria that exist in Germany. As far as these investigations concern Anwar R, they have already been submitted to the court in their entirety according to the public prosecutors. But where the files concern other cases, only the investigating authorities know them. The court rejected the request to see the files, stating that it did not see sufficient reasons why seeing the files would lead to more extensive findings in the proceedings against Anwar R. Such findings had not been presented by the defense either.

On the 86th day of the trial, joint plaintiff A was heard as a witness. The man had been detained in al-Khatib in the summer of 2012 and gave a composed account of his experiences to the court.

As soon as he was arrested, A was severely mistreated and forced to repeat statements such as “Assad is my God” while being beaten on the street, with soldiers filming and laughing at him. They tortured him and did not give him food or drink or access to a toilet for a day and a half. He endured sexual violence – and even his mock execution. The militiamen said to him then, “You won’t get death that easily, you will wish for it but you won’t get it,” and took him to the al-Khatib detention center.

The first night there in the overcrowded collective cell remained particularly memorable to the witness because it was here that he first experienced how a fellow prisoner died: when A and the other prisoners drew the guards’ attention to the fact that a man was dying and asked for help, they received the answer that they should only let them know when the man was dead and then take him out; he would be thrown “in the garbage.” The man died that same night. More deaths followed in the coming weeks.

Because A was already physically exhausted by his torture at the time of his arrest, he was transferred to the military hospital in Harasta the following day. Here, various intelligence prisons apparently had their own wards or rooms. In Harasta, however, A was not treated but subjected to massive further torture and humiliation. For example, he was tied to a bed with several other prisoners. The abuse was non-stop and without any goal. Even the nurses were stubbing out their cigarettes on the prisoners. A saw more dead bodies there, often left for several hours or collected in the toilet, probably as a deterrent – once he even saw the body of a child. Several prisoners died during this time, one right next to A, in the same bed and tied to him.

Back in al-Khatib, A was “interrogated.” He was beaten with plastic hoses and electric cables, burned with lit plastic bags, and tortured with other methods that previous witnesses here in Koblenz had also reported. He could constantly hear the screams of the tortured; in the extremely cramped conditions in the communal cell, quite a few lost their minds. Again and again – the witness spoke of “everyday life” – detainees died in the cell. Prayers for the dead were then secretly said in community.

The witness also told the court about a man who made decisions in al-Khatib, such as who came to the hospital or received medication. This man, he said, was addressed respectfully by the soldiers and was called “father of the birthmark” among the detainees. He described his appearance, which he had seen briefly from under his blindfold, and his dialect. Whether the defendant, Anwar R, who also has a conspicuous birthmark, is the “father of the birthmark,” A could neither confirm nor exclude. A had also stated during his testimony at the Federal Criminal Police Office that he had first seen Anwar R in photos on the news. At that time, he would have naturally drawn a conclusion about the “father of the birthmark,” but today he could not clearly recognize Anwar R. At the suggestion of the defense, the police interrogator who had questioned A at the time is now also to be heard as a witness.

Day 85 began with a delay. The summoned witness was worried about his family members still living in Syria. He was assigned a joint plaintiff representative as witness counsel shortly before the hearing and then decided to testify anonymously. The man came into the courtroom uncertainly, his face covered with a mask and a hood over his head. He spoke softly and in an Arabic to which no dialect and thus place of origin could be assigned.

The witness described how it had come to his arrest in 2012 in his hometown near Damascus. Bashar al-Assad’s forces had raided the village and arbitrarily arrested people – among them the witness. Still in his home, security guards pushed him to the ground, beat him and kicked his head with their boots. He was taken to a public place in the village along with others. They were made to squat and wait before being forced on a bus and transported to the al-Khatib department. The witness recalled that 80 to 100 people were arrested along with him.

Only after his release did the witness learn that he had been detained in al-Khatib. Upon his arrival, the guards had pulled his undershirt over his head and ordered him to always look down. His 3-by-3-meter cell had held 27 people, so no one could lie down. “It is impossible to sleep there,” the witness said. One fellow prisoner was having trouble breathing. When the others called for help, a guard came and stepped on the prisoner’s chest and asked if he was feeling better now.

“We were among the ‘pampered’ prisoners in al-Khatib,” the witness said. He himself had not been tortured and was released after three days. He explained it by the fact that there were some high-ranking people living in his village, including a Syrian army general and a member of the parliament, who probably had interceded on behalf of him and the others from the village.

Upon release, they all – after being taught about love of country and loyalty to the Assad regime – had to sign a pledge to ensure they would never demonstrate against the regime again.

The chairwoman repeated the announcement from the previous day: the current room will be renovated, and on 29 and 30 September, and 6, 7, 13 and 14 October 2021, the trial will be held in the previous room, Koblenz Regional Court, Karmeliterstr. 14, room 128.

The two witnesses summoned for day 84 made only brief statements. The first witness was an officer of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). His testimony was about the case of Malek (name changed, see day 35 and 36), who probably died in the al-Khatib Branch. Malek’s brother, who is a joint plaintiff in the proceedings, had submitted documents after his interrogation by the police. Among them was a letter to the UN in which he described Malek’s case. Anwar R’s defense lawyers had demanded that the contents and the origin of the letter be confirmed in court by the responsible BKA man. Since this was done quickly, the first testimony ended after only 15 minutes.

The second witness followed: MH. As usual, the presiding judge gave the joint plaintiff time to familiarize himself with the technology in the room. MH then spoke about his arrest in July 2012 and his detention in al-Khatib. The witness testified that he was forcibly detained along with his uncle and cousin for no reason when they had stopped only briefly at a gas station near Damascus. He described the situation: it had looked catastrophic, the supermarket near the gas station had been completely destroyed. Several security personnel had gathered there, as there had been fighting nearby between the regime and the Free Syrian Army. MH and his relatives were arrested before they could refuel and were taken by bus to an unknown location and later to al-Khatib.

On the bus, they were insulted and abused. MH crouched on the ground to avoid being seen and called his brother to ask for help. Fortunately, his brother was able to intervene, which is why MH was detained in al-Khatib for only three days.

After the testimony, the court read out the statement of the Federal Public Prosecutor on the motion of several joint plaintiffs from 22 July 2021, in which they had requested that enforced disappearances also be included in the indictment as a crime against humanity. The public prosecutors opposed the issuance of the notice. They argued that German law requires an “official request for information” of which the perpetrator must have had positive knowledge. However, this line of argument would mean that the offense could arguably never be applied in situations where, as in Syria, enforced disappearances are commonplace. Thus, this law would remain without effect.

The public prosecutors further argued that the detentions in al-Khatib were not done with the intention of making people disappear, but primarily for gathering information. The disappearance of the detainees was merely a side effect of the detention and not the goal, they said.

In view of this assessment, the joint plaintiff representatives and some present in the audience reacted visibly indignant to the statement. The lawyers reserved the right to issue a counter-opinion on the motion in the coming weeks.

At the end of the hearing, the presiding judge announced important information: on 29 and 30 September as well as on 6, 7, 13 and 14 October 2021, the proceedings will again take place in the Koblenz Regional Court, Karmeliterstr. 14, room 128, i.e. in the room in which the proceedings took place until the beginning of 2021. After that, the court will return to the current room of the Higher Regional Court.

The witness, who had been summoned on day 83 of the trial, entered the courtroom wearing a hood and mask and was thus barely recognizable. The presiding judge first pointed out to him that he could not testify anonymously, as this was only allowed to persons whose life or freedom was threatened. The witness finally gave his name and explained that he was the defendant’s son-in-law. The judge then informed him of his right to refuse to testify, but the witness emphasized that he wanted to speak. He had known the defendant since childhood because they were related. At that time, he himself had lived in Homs, and Anwar R had already lived in Damascus. Later, he asked R’s daughter to marry him, whereupon they saw each other more often.

Anwar R first worked as a policeman, then studied law and later joined the secret service. According to his own statements to the witness, he worked with embassies and accompanied delegations from abroad, protected state institutions and prepared security reports.

When asked what Anwar R had done from 2011 onward, the witness asked to be allowed to consult the notes he had brought with him. He then reported a major arrest at a demonstration at the beginning of the uprisings in Damascus. On the orders of Hafiz Makhlouf, he said, demonstrators had been arrested and taken to the al-Khatib Branch, where they were released with the help of his father-in-law. Anwar R was then accused of sympathizing with the detainees. As a result, R felt that he was being monitored. He reported this himself whenever the witness visited him and his wife in Damascus. Finally, R was deprived of his authority.

During this time i.e. in April or May 2011, R, according to the witness, also told him about his decision to desert. The witness stated that he himself had tried to help R in this endeavor, but without success, since R only wanted to leave Syria together with his entire family, not alone. Finally, the witness reported that he had left the country together with his family in September 2012; R said at that time that he, too, would flee as soon as possible.

At various points during his testimony, the witness repeatedly emphasized that his father-in-law had helped many people in Syria, including years before the uprisings in 2011, and that he knew R had not wanted to join the Free Syrian Army because he condemned carrying weapons on any side of the conflict. Overall, the questioning seemed strenuous and not very purposeful to the audience, because the witness repeatedly did not answer the questions and instead emphasized flatly that Anwar R had been a modest person and helper of the detainees.

At the end of his testimony, the witness pointed out that R and his family were massively insulted in social networks and were considered fair game. He emphasized that in Germany, a state governed by the rule of law, everyone must be considered innocent until the day of conviction.

The joint plaintiff Y, who had testified the previous day and was present during the testimony, exercised her procedural right to make a statement regarding the witness’s statements. She pointed out that the witness mostly spoke of “events” in relation to 2011, but not of “a revolution.” In Arabic usage, she said, this stands for a political classification of the events at that time coinciding with that of the Syrian regime.

In conclusion, the ECCHR partner lawyers read out a motion on behalf of 13 joint plaintiffs to issue a further legal notice with the aim of also including the crime of enforced disappearance in the indictment. Between 100,000 and 150,000 people are considered missing in Syria, and witnesses in the trial have repeatedly reported this systematic action against the civilian population. Other joint plaintiff representatives joined the motion.

Due to technical problems, day 82 at the Koblenz Higher Regional Court started late. When the joint plaintiff Y took her seat in front of the judge, she announced that she wanted to testify in German. In addition to some spectators and journalists, a member of the European Parliament was also present that day as a trial observer.

Starting, Y explained that she was from Damascus and had been politically active since the beginning of the Syrian revolution. She had been detained several times – including in the al-Khatib detention center. She was arrested at a checkpoint about 70 kilometers from Damascus. She was then taken to a smaller security department, her ID card, laptop and other belongings were taken from her and she was sent home with the announcement that she should report to the al-Khatib department the next day.

Y reported that she initially hid and took security precautions. “I had already heard a lot about the department. I didn’t want to go there without securing myself first. There were people who went to the department and never came back”. She said she knew of at least eleven people who did not return from al-Khatib and presumably died in detention.

Eventually, she said, she went to al-Khatib and turned herself in. The first day, she said, she just sat in an office – waiting for hours until she was sent away again with orders to come back the next day. Then she met her investigator for the first time, who questioned her in an office. “He was nice, he pretended to be supportive.” During the interrogation, Y reported, she lied. The interrogator was not convinced, becoming impatient after a few days. “At some point, the interrogations were no longer so friendly,” the witness said. He finally took her to another room where there were several people – “so that I could remember better.” There, Y was tortured several times, not by the investigator himself, but by two younger guards. She said she was often made to wait for hours, sometimes with her hands tied over her head, and no one spoke to her. “I felt that, in addition to the severe physical violence, the waiting itself was also torture.”

When asked, the witness confirmed that she had also seen defendant Anwar R in the ward. She had once been led into a room to meet an “important person” – not Anwar R. In the luxurious office, several men sat in a corner and drank tea, including R. In addition, he had also been present sporadically during her interrogations. He had never spoken to her directly, but was also in the room once when she was beaten. The investigator told the witness at that time that she should consider herself lucky that she had him as an investigator and the other man – the defendant – by her side. As Sunnis, they would help her get out of the department again.

In total, Y reported, she had to return to al-Khatib on and off for about two months. She was to provide information about her work and contacts, to report whenever she would travel. A few times in April, she also had to stay in the department for several days at a time. She spent the time in a small single cell without light under – as Y later stated in conversation with friends – relatively “good” conditions. During this time, she did not see any other prisoners, but she heard screams from women, which she remembers to this day. Mostly, however, Y was sent home after the interrogations.

When asked if she could imagine what the purpose of her many stays and “special” treatment was, Y stated that it was expected that she would cooperate with the Assad government and intelligence services. Eventually, Y was given a travel permit – one way, she was told not to return. Then, Y explained, she eventually left Syria.

After the witness was released, a legal notice was issued by the senate: according to the doctor’s testimony on day 75 of the trial on 23 June, Anwar R’s conviction for another ten murders could be considered beyond the current indictment.

On the day 81 of the al-Khatib trial, M, another joint plaintiff, testified. He described how on 14 October 2011, after a peaceful demonstration against the Syrian government, he was arrested, taken to the al-Khatib Branch, and tortured. “The guards did what they wanted,” M reported.

On day of his arrest, M had a camera with him, with which he filmed and photographed the approximately 50 demonstrators. According to the witness, he wanted to upload the videos to his YouTube channel. The security service besieged the area and when he tried to get home, he encountered an armed security patrol. M was arrested and put into a vehicle. Together with other people, he was first driven to a hospital that served as a temporary camp for arrestees. Subsequently, they were all taken to the al-Khatib Branch, he said.

M also testified about the hierarchical structure in al-Khatib. He was even able to give the name of Anwar R’s deputy: the latter had introduced himself to him personally. The deputy had given him a blank piece of paper in order to write down a confession. Since he had committed no crime, he had simply written about his life and the demonstrations, M recounted. He was then taken to an office where, among others, Anwar R and his deputy had been. R, he said, read the “confession,” threw the sheets in M’s face, and then gave orders to the deputy and one of the guards to “make M understand.” They were to bring him back “when he was ready,” reported M. They then led him back to his cell. For three days, he was neither allowed to sit nor to lie down. When he fell asleep, the guards beat him.

Through hours of interrogation, during which he was maltreated with belt blows, it became clear to him that Anwar R was the commander of the al-Khatib Branch, M stated. The deputy allegedly addressed Anwar R as “my lord,” and R conversely addressed the deputy without any form of courtesy. This invalidates a decisive statement by Anwar R (see trial report day 5): he had testified that he had been relieved of his responsibility after the start of the riots and that the deputy had actually become the chief interrogator in the branch.

In total, the witness was imprisoned for more than three months. In the meantime, he had been transferred to Kafr Sousa prison and later brought back to al-Khatib. After his release, M was arrested once again. He said that to this day he is undergoing physical and psychological treatment and is barely able to work due to sleep and mental problems.

During the hearing, it became evident that some of the videos, which are still available on M’s YouTube channel, possibly show the bodies of persons M claimed were killed in the al-Khatib Branch. In the opinion of some plaintiffs’ representatives, the court did not investigate this sufficiently. They therefore requested that some of the videos be presented to the witness for identification, which led to tension among the trial participants. The federal prosecution offered to commission the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) to evaluate the YouTube channel.

The litigants then questioned the witness about the persons he believed had died in the al-Khatib Branch. It was then agreed that the witness would be shown screenshots from two videos to identify the persons displayed there and that the court would otherwise wait for the BKA’s evaluation of the videos. M complied with the identification. Therefore, the joint plaintiffs’ lawyers withdrew their motions for evidence.

It was a rainy day when S, another witness and survivor of the al-Khatib Branch, testified in Koblenz. He recounted how his brother and him had been arrested in late 2010 before the revolution began, and how they were tortured in al-Khatib. Back then, at around four o’clock in the morning, the security service arrested them at their home in Damascus. At first, S did not know that they took his brother as well. S was 17 years old at the time.

With his shirt pulled over his head, S was taken in a car to Branch 251. During the ride, he already had to sit in a so-called stress position: an uncomfortable posture, kneeling with his hands in the air and his back at a 45-degree angle. When S tried to raise his head, one of the officers hit him on the head with a gun, the witness said.

Then, S first spoke about his detention. As soon as he arrived in al-Khatib, he said that he was beaten by several guards, forced to undress and wait in his underwear. S estimated that he had stayed in Branch 251 for more than a month. During this time, he was taken to several interrogations during which the guards asked him repeatedly whether he had been part of a political Kurdish group. The reason: his family comes from Kobane, a city in the Kurdish region of Syria. His brother had also been accused of avoiding military service in order to join the PKK. When he denied the accusations, he was beaten severely, including with cables on his head and feet, the witness added. His brother had been tortured with electric shocks and the dulab method.

The witness also spoke about the unbearable living conditions in detention: his cell was small and filled with 20 to 30 men. They could only sleep pressed back to back. They were given a military blanket only. Many had difficulty breathing and were threatened with beatings if they went to the toilet. S also said that none of the men had the courage to talk to other prisoners about the torture they had suffered. Nevertheless: the traces of torture were clearly visible on all detainees.

In addition, S reported the detention of an elderly man who gave the impression of having been imprisoned for a long time. He could hardly walk anymore, yet he was repeatedly taken away for torture interrogations. The witness was visibly moved in court that day and repeatedly asked the rhetorical question of what reason there could be for detaining this man for so long under these conditions.  
S was released in early 2011 after more than a month in detention. His brother, on the other hand, was forced to remain in the al-Khatib Branch and was later transferred to other intelligence branches as well. Upon his release, employees of al-Khatib admitted to S that mistakes may have been made regarding the detentions and that not all of the men were “criminals.” However, this procedure was simply the employees’ task. Back then, S and the other men could say no more than “thank you” in response.

Even though the witness found it difficult to identify specific individuals after the time that had passed, his testimony is important evidence proving that even before the uprisings against President Bashar al-Assad and the subsequent armed conflict, the Syrian government systematically tortured in order to silence the opposition – that is, at a time when Anwar R had described that the intelligence services had worked according to rule-of-law standards (see trial report day 5).

On day 79 of the trial, M, another survivor and joint plaintiff represented by ECCHR partner lawyers, testified as a witness. In the beginning, he described how he was detained in Damascus in 2011: “My wife and daughters went to a demonstration for the city of Daraa, which was under siege by the regime at the time. I was just taking photos.” As a result, he said, he was forcibly abducted by security officers.

The witness was briefly taken to Branch 40 and from there to the al-Khatib Branch. He stated that he immediately recognized the place, as his parents’ house was located nearby. “As a child, we used to play in the park in front of al-Khatib,” he said. “I know the area like the back of my hand.”

Shortly after his imprisonment, M entered a room with three desks and two people: Anwar R and Khodr K. He explained that he had read these names on tags placed on the desks at that time. When asked, the witness identified Anwar R in the courtroom as one of these people. 

M reported that the interrogation by Anwar R had initially proceeded calmly until he asked R about the reason for his detention in al-Khatib. Then, M recounted, R became angry and red-faced. He denied that they were actually in al-Khatib and told the guards: “Throw him out.”

M was severely tortured several times in the detention center. He told the court how one day, three guards came to his cell, with Anwar R having stood behind them. A guard entered and told him to kneel on the floor. The guard showed M photos of M’s family and M himself at the protest. He then gave the witness a strong kick on the shoulder. Another time, M was completely undressed and cabled. He then felt an electric shock in his body – so strong that the witness let out a loud scream. “Never in my life did pain make me scream like that,” he recounted in the courtroom. After the electric torture, the witness was bleeding heavily under his fingernails. M said, he eventually lost faith in the humanity of his torturers. “There were cockroaches in my cell. I took one on my finger and talked to it: ‘You have more humanity than the beasts who tortured me.’”

Eventually, M was brought to Kafr Sousa. Among the people on the transfer, he met a 15-year-old boy who had bloodstains on his pants. The boy seemed to be in shock and initially refused to speak. However, he later built up confidence and described to M how guards in the al-Khatib Branch had raped him with a wooden stick. M was visibly shaken when he told the court about this. He had advised the boy not to tell anyone about it, including his parents. “In our society, we find such things very difficult to deal with,” M explained.

Until today, the witness feels the effects of his detention. He told the court that he often has nightmares and is undergoing psychological as well as medical treatment due to possible long-term effects of the electric torture.

On day 77, a witness who is a joint plaintiff in the al-Khatib trial testified. He himself survived torture in the Syrian intelligence department – and suffers from the consequences to this day. The man was arrested in February 2012 and brought to the al-Khatib Branch. He particularly remembers his arrest and abduction: he was simply taken from his residential area in the morning and placed in the back of a jeep. Someone pulled his shirt over his head so that he could not see anything. The car then drove him and the other prisoners to some kind of collection point, where he was forced to transfer to a military bus. While doing so, one of the officers beat and insulted him. Only then did he understand that he had been arrested because he had not only worked for various hospitals but because he had also set up field hospitals for the opposition. After about an hour’s drive, the bus stopped near a handful of farms on the road. The witness heard gunshots shortly after and, because he kept pulling up his shirt, saw an armored vehicle approaching the bus.

What he now reported visibly shook the man: tied to the vehicle by the hands was a person, a boy, no older than 16 years, his face covered in blood, his intestines hanging out. Three children between five and ten years old were then brought into the bus, they were all crying and shaking with fear, the witness said. He put his hand on the head of the child next to him and asked why he was crying, he said. One of the boys replied, “My brother was killed.”

The following night, the witness had then been driven to the al-Khatib Branch. There he was received with the brutal “welcome party,” where he was beaten and humiliated. Later he was taken to an overcrowded cell with terrible hygienic conditions, there was too little water, hardly any food. One of his fellow prisoners had sores on his feet, his toes were rotting, yet he received no medical help. The witness then tried to bandage the other man’s feet with his undershirt, other prisoners lost their minds after being tortured again and again.

The joint plaintiff himself was also tortured in al-Khatib, including with the shabeh method; during another interrogation, he knelt in a pool of water that had been electrified. The man was also able to report that on one occasion guards kicked him so hard in the genitals that he still suffers from the consequences today.

The witness’s partly very detailed descriptions of his detention coincide with earlier testimonies of witnesses who had reported on the inhumane torture and conditions in al-Khatib.

A witness who is currently living in France was invited to testify on day 78. However, he had previously announced that he did not wish to speak in court.

Instead, an official of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) reported on another witness’s interrogation. He had personally questioned this man in 2019 who reported to him then that he had been tortured in al-Khatib. The witness had been taken out of the cell, blindfolded and his hands tied, in the interrogation room he had had to stand the whole time, he had been beaten with hands, later also with a stick, and he had also been tortured in the genital area and in the neck with electric shocks. When he once asked for water, guards tied off his penis and forced him to drink a lot. The man had also told him about a killed fellow prisoner who had been tortured with the shabeh method and had died in front of his eyes.

Even if the witness had been nervous during his testimony, there was no reason to doubt the truth of the statement, the BKA man said.

On day 75, a former Syrian doctor brought a new perspective to the al-Khatib trial with his testimony. At the time of the so-called Arab Spring, he had been practicing at a hospital in Damascus, directly across the street from the al-Khatib Branch. Starting in July 2012, he said, medical help was repeatedly called to the intelligence department from the hospital. The pediatrician himself had regularly “treated” detainees in al-Khatib, and in some cases, they were brought to the hospital and treated there.

At that time, the doctor gained relatively good insight into the al-Khatib Branch and was able to give the court important information from his medical point of view. He intensely described the different types of injuries he had examined and even said that “they looked like the Caesar photos.” He spoke of certain bruises, contusions, or wounds that suggested torture; many of the prisoners showed clear signs of malnutrition. The witness also reported that he had never seen injuries like these in his previous professional career.

In addition, the man had treated people for whom any medical help was too late and who then died in his care. Actually, he said, efforts had been made not to let the doctors see what was happening in al-Khatib; most of the time he had been there outside the prison or in designated rooms. Nevertheless, he had been taken to the basement a few times, had seen people being tortured, and had also deducted from his medical work that people were being mistreated and dying in al-Khatib. The guards strictly forbid him to talk to his patients. If prisoners wanted to explain the causes of their injuries and said, for example, that their wounds were results of torture, the guards present immediately punished them.

For both the torture and killing allegations, the doctor’s brave testimony was important as it proves that the accused crimes happened before September 2012, and thus within the charged time frame.

On day 76, the former police chief of the Syrian city of Hama testified. He had met Anwar R while still in training in the 1990s – and then later met him again in Berlin, where they both lived after fleeing Syria.

He first reported on the consequences one had to expect if, as a civil servant, one opposed the increasing violence against demonstrators in 2011 – which had indeed been possible. He himself was punitively transferred to the Ministry of the Interior after criticizing the government’s approach and later was forced to retire early. In the secret services, the treatment of critics was harsher, but there was always the possibility of claiming a serious illness, a heart defect or something similar if one wanted to escape the system, the witness said. It would have been possible to find doctors who would have issued a certificate of disability.

The man also testified that people in Syria had known how the intelligence services operated before 2011. So someone who had signed up for an intelligence career must have known what he or she was doing.

After the camera crew filming Anwar R’s arrival left the courtroom, the presiding judge explained the changed circumstances of day 74 of the trial: the lawyer representing today’s witness was sick, so ECCHR partner attorney Patrick Kroker would represent him. The atmosphere was tense as witness “A” entered the courtroom. The survivor was visibly emotional. The presiding judge told him that the court could recess if he needed a break.

First, A introduced himself: he is from a very well-known family in Syria and was a professional boxer for the national team in the early 2000s. His family, which had always been interested in politics, had publicly criticized Bashar al-Assad’s takeover of power. As a result, A was expelled from the national team.

A was incarcerated thirteen times in Syria, and tortured each time. This left considerable physical and psychological damage, which impairs his memory to this day. He presented numerous medical certificates and expert opinions from his six years of treatment in Luxembourg. Eleven of his 21 operations had to be performed directly as a result of the torture.

In a trembling voice, A told of his first imprisonment in 2007 in the al-Khatib Branch, which defendant Anwar R headed at the time. It was there, A said, that he met Anwar R for the first time. After arriving in the overcrowded communal cell, he was taken to Anwar R for questioning. The latter accused him of supporting the opposition and being a foreign spy. He spoke with Anwar R until the latter said to a guard, “You know what to do with him.” Severe torture followed daily for months. The survivor described how he was abused with electric and cable shocks. He also said that he was hung by his hands for several hours using the shabeh method or forced into a tire (dulab).

After about eight months in detention, A.was released, but only after a bribe had been paid. In 2010, he was taken back to al-Khatib because he supported an opposition newspaper. He testified about the torture and the unbearable living conditions he experienced then.

In his testimony, A emphasized the defendant’s unrestricted position of power in Branch 251 and Syria generally. The latter always acted according to the carrot-and-stick method. He smiled at detainees and ordered their torture, which would not have been carried out without his consent.

Further detentions in other branches, which severely scarred the witness psychologically and physically, followed in 2011 and 2012. During his last detention, a delegation of the UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan lobbied for his release. A delegation member advised him to leave Syria, otherwise the regime would have him arrested and tortured again. A followed the advice and has been trying to make a fresh start since fleeing to Luxembourg “so that I can eventually lead a halfway normal life again,” he said.

Day 73 of the al-Khatib trial was a warm summer day and the courtroom was hot. The lawyers were even allowed to take off their robes. However, the summer mood changed immediately when, at the beginning of the day, the presiding judge distributed evidence the witness brought with him, a photo of his missing brother-in-law – murdered and with signs of torture.

The joint plaintiff “M” began his detailed testimony: one of his brothers had actively helped organize demonstrations against the Assad regime in 2011; M and his other brothers took part in the protests at the time. As a result, the brothers ended up on a list of wanted opponents of the regime. M recalled how in the summer of 2011, at around 3 am, armed members of the Syrian army stormed the house and arrested him and his brothers. Barefoot and wearing only an undershirt and shorts, he was blindfolded and put on a bus headed to the al-Khatib Branch. Throughout the ride, a soldier stepped on his feet with heavy shoes. At the prison, they were taken to a basement where they were forced to undress completely and humiliated.

M recounted the confinement, hunger and unbearable heat in their communal cell, which was overcrowded with about 125 people. One day, he saw detained children, between eight and nine years old, as well as older men in their 80s. Since he was in a state of shock at the time, he could not say anything about the children’s health and psychological condition. However, he had seen that security forces regularly abused prisoners with batons. Furthermore, the witness described how prisoners were interrogated and tortured with electric shocks. The screams of those tortured were omnipresent and could be heard every day. After five days, he was blindfolded in an office and questioned about his participation in the demonstrations. He denied this and was then transferred to an even smaller cell with his older brother. Approximately 35 prisoners were crowded there together; there was no room to lie down. Many bodies showed grave signs of torture.

After being transferred again, he was assured that after eleven days, he would be released. In reality, however, he was taken to another prison. It was not until mid-August 2011 that M was finally released and returned to his family, who had not known that he was detained. The Syrian regime systematically disappears civilians to oppress the population. According to the witness, anyone who was detained had disappeared – relatives had no chance of finding out anything about the whereabouts of their missing family member.

When further questioned by the court, M testified that his brother-in-law, whose picture he brought with him, was arrested in 2012 and never returned. His family assumed that he had also been taken to the al-Khatib Branch, as it was responsible for people in the area he lived. About two or three years later, his family found this photo online among the Caesar photos (see trial reports 38-42).

The witness’ sister told him later in Germany that Anwar R had threatened his brother, who was also imprisoned in al-Khatib, with sexual violence against her if he did not sign certain documents.

The Syrian torture survivor who was summoned on day 71 of the al-Khatib trial was originally scheduled to testify in January 2021. However, he raised concerns in December 2020 and requested a new date in July. When asked, he agreed to testify at the end of May – but later wrote another email saying he felt sorry for the defendant’s family and that this trial was not much use anyway. So it looked like he would not show up for his summons date. He did not write any more replies to emails from the court and – as expected – did not appear on this day of the trial day. This is not the first time that a summoned witness refused to testify in court. The pressure on witnesses and their families seems to be too intense, the fear of possible retaliation too great.

Even witnesses summoned to future trial days repeatedly cancel their appointments or cannot be reached after the initial contact. Instead of being able to hear witnesses in person, the court has to resort to indirect statements that they have given to the police in Germany or abroad.

This also happened on day 71: minutes from a Norweigan police investigation were read aloud. The Syrian witness interviewed did not want to testify before a German court under any circumstances. He stated that he had actively participated in demonstrations in Damascus from April to June 2011 and had been arrested three times for this. He had spent a total of three months in various intelligence department detention centers, including about 17 days in the al-Khatib Branch. He was brutally beaten as soon as he arrived there. Torture and ill-treatment were omnipresent. He said, “All prisoners were subjected to violence and torture. You heard it; you talked about it.” The conditions in the cell were desolate: 50 people in one cell, without a toilet, and too little food. He was released only because his family paid bribes.

The court then read the testimony of another witness, taken by the French police. This witness also stated that he had actively participated in the protest movement before his arrest. He spent about 30 days in the al-Khatib detention center. There, he had been severely tortured and constantly heard his fellow detainees' screams in his tiny cell.

He had also reported that his family had desperately searched for him during his detention. His family only even heard that he had been arrested by chance. Thereafter, his father contacted various intelligence officers. During the last attempt, his father was told to forget his son and not ask after him again. This statement is important because the crime of forced disappearance has not played a role in the trial so far. But evidence is mounting that people were systematically disappeared in al-Khatib, and their relatives had no way of finding out where the missing people were – or if they were even alive.

At the end of the day, the record of a chat concerning a missed relative was read aloud, which continued the following day. Specifically, the evidence concerned a Facebook conversation of a man who had also previously testified as joint plaintiff in Koblenz (see day 35). In the chat, the he had been in contact with an eyewitness who was said to have seen his brother Malek (name anonymized) die in al-Khatib. The eyewitness wrote that he was present when the guards forced another detainee to beat Malek. After that, Malek’s health deteriorated noticeably, until at some point, he was carried out of the cell dead. The brother gave the chat history to the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) after testifying in Koblenz.

On day 72, a scientific analyst from the BKA was invited to evaluate the Facebook messages. His job was to assess whether the statements made there were consistent with other evidence on the situation in Syria, to which he answered yes. According to his testimony, the information provided in the conversation about the detention conditions in the al-Khatib Branch was conclusive.

Faith Sara testified on day 70 of the trial at the Koblenz Higher Regional Court. He is well-known as a journalist, regime critic and opposition leader to many observers of the Syrian conflict. Syrian intelligence services imprisoned Sara, who now lives in Europe, three times between 1978 and 2011 for his opposition activities. In 2011, Anwar R, the main defendant in the al-Khatib trial, personally interrogated him. Anwar R asked that Sara be called as a witness in his defense. The defendant had allegedly helped Sara during his last detention and quickly released him. In addition, Sara was supposed to have known about Anwar R’s allegedly critical stance toward the regime even at that time. However, the politician’s testimony clearly contradicted the information Anwar R had provided.

Sara testified that at least he was not tortured during his 2011 imprisonment. He assumed this was because the intelligence services already had all the information they wanted about him as a known opposition leader, and therefore did not need to coerce any further statements from him. Rather, the security forces deliberately tortured younger men whom they suspected of actively participating in the protests in order to break their resistance, Sara said.

The judges asked Sara what he knew about Anwar R, but Sara could only give general information. In Damascus, people spoke about Anwar R – there had been some accusations in connection with his intelligence work – but that was all he knew. In exile in Turkey, an acquaintance once approached Sara to ask if he could give a man named Anwar R, who had deserted, his phone number. This was the man who had interrogated him in 2011. Sara allowed the acquaintance to give Anwar R his number, but the latter never contacted him. Moreover, today in the courtroom was the first time he ever saw Anwar R face-to-face; he was blindfolded during his interrogation in 2011.

The defendant had stated that in detention, he was friendly towards Sara and offered him drinks, and released him directly from al-Khatib after an hour-long interrogation. Sara emphasized, however, that no one had offered him drinks, he was released from al-Khatib after several hours, and then sent directly to another intelligence unit. He also testified that a security guard being friendly to a prisoner had never been a good sign in Syria.

Rather than exonerating Anwar R, Sara’s testimony left those in the courtroom again doubting the defendant’s credibility.

The witness summoned on day 69 of the trial was already known to the court and some spectators from the previous week’s testimony: her daughter “N” testified on day 67 and 68 about their partly joint imprisonment. The mother was summoned because the defendant named her in his statement (see trial day 5). This was remarkable because she was imprisoned in al-Khatib, and therefore experienced the inhuman circumstances there herself, and visited Branch 251 several times to try to protect her daughters who were incarcerated there. Her testimony expands on that of her daughter (see day 67 and 68).

The witness first recounted how two of her three daughters, “R” and “M,” were arrested on 15 March 2011, the “beginning of the Syrian revolution,” as she put it.

R and M were the first young women arrested as a result of a demonstration. Security forces searched the family’s house shortly after their arrests. When the witness asked them what the search was about and when they would bring her daughters back, she was told “in two hours.” However, after her daughters did not return that night or the next day, the witness looked for her daughters herself. She went to the President’s office and to various intelligence agencies and departments. Everywhere, they laughed at her, she said.

Three days after the daughters’ detention, at a rally in front of the Palace of Justice, where many families demanded information about detained relatives, she came face to face with the intelligence officer “Khaled,” who took her and her husband to the al-Khatib Branch, where their daughters were incarcerated. 

They were led to a large office where three people were waiting, among them Anwar R, she realized later. Her daughters R and M were led in. M’s headscarf was covered in blood, her face in red marks and blue bruises. When the witness tried to hug M, her daughter said her body hurt all over. Her other daughter R was also “in very bad shape.” R was allowed to return home with her family that day, but M was not released. After the president declared amnesty for imprisoned demonstrators about ten days later, the family returned to the al-Khatib Branch in the hopes of being able to pick up M. They had another meeting with Anwar R, who refused to release M immediately. She was released two days later.

The court asked the witness about Anwar R’s statement about her first visit to al Khatib. The defendant claimed that the witness’ husband, who was also present, punched his daughter M hard in the face, making her bleed. The witness vehemently affirmed the accuracy of her own account, and repeated what she had just said. In the dock, Anwar R shook his head.

The witness was then questioned about her own detention and that of her third daughter “N.” In May 2012, in response to the Houla massacre, N participated in a sit-in. The witness accompanied her young daughter there to protect her. Suddenly, many security guards appeared and shots were fired in the air. The witness was dragged into a small bus, as was N a short time later. N’s glasses were broken and her nose was bleeding. First, they were taken to Subdivision 40, and then on to al-Khatib. Until then, she only knew about the above-ground offices from her visits; this time, she was taken to the basement. Initially, she and her daughter were placed in an approximately three-by-three-meter cell without windows that housed about 20 women. She was only interrogated once, and the interrogating officer had been nice to her. However, he also told her that her daughter’s interrogation would be very harsh. When N returned from the interrogation, one could see that she was very tired and had been beaten. The witness cried as she recounted this to the court.

After a few days, guards took the witness to a solitary cell, from which she witnessed her daughter being called back in for interrogation. She heard N scream and, through a crack under the door, saw her fall to the floor and eventually, be dragged away. About four days later, N was brought to her cell, covered in blood. Since the cell was only about 150 by 75 centimeters, they had to take turns sleeping. Overall, the detention conditions were terrible: water was severely rationed despite the heat, as were toilet visits, which is why the witness now has chronic kidney problems. She was also denied regular access to her critical high blood pressure medication.

The mother and daughter remained together in the single cell for about 18 days. After a total of 23 days, the witness was taken to Anwar R again. She could see that he continued to command authority, as the guards submitted to him. The witness was then allowed to leave al-Khatib; she had lost nine kilograms in detention. On the same day, her daughter N was transferred to another branch, and later released.

On day 67 and 68 of the trial, only one joint plaintiff was called to testify – a clear sign of the court’s view of her significance to the proceedings. Even before the trial began, it was clear that the young woman’s testimony would not be easy: she was noticeably tense. For the first time in the trial, psychosocial support was present to assist the witness, an option all survivors of serious acts of violence are entitled to, but has some problems in practice in Germany (for more information, see ECCHR and partner organizations’ “Breaking Down Barriers” report on implementing the rights of survivors of grave international crimes). 

Witness “N” took her seat in front of the judge next to her translator, lawyer and court advocate. She spoke in a clear, firm voice. Before describing her detention, she told the court that one of her sisters was detained during one of the first large demonstrations on 15 March 2011 – the day that is considered the beginning of the uprisings against the Assad regime.

A year later, on 25 May 2012, the witness participated in a sit-in, a reaction to the Hula massacre. The witness fled, but security forces stopped her and checked her ID. They apparently recognized her name, beat her, and threatened her with a rifle. When a bus finally arrived to take her to prison, she saw her mother. She had been worried about her young daughter and had therefore accompanied her to the demonstration; she had also been arrested. After a short ride to Branch 40, the bus stopped and the prisoners got out. They were beaten again, and the men and women separated. Security forces showed N a thick file – allegedly about her activities at demonstrations and online. It appeared they had been watching her for a while. A few hours later, a bus took the women to Branch 251.

Upon arrival, the nine women walked down a flight of stairs. The witness reported how she was taken to see a doctor and two nurses. N was forced to undress, and the nurses examined her, including her private parts – a process she described as humiliating. “It felt like abuse,” she said. Eventually, the women were taken to a communal cell. The small cell was full of vermin; sleeping was only possible in shifts. The atmosphere was tense; no one dared to say anything out of fear that there might be regime supporters in the cell to spy on the others.

N described how terrible it was for her to be in prison together with her mother. She felt that she was to blame for her mother’s imprisonment. When N was interrogated, she was accused of calling for the murder of a regime supporter who spied on the opposition because she had warned demonstration organizers about him. In interrogations, she was threatened with long prison sentences, and later, tortured. She was hung by her hands (shabeh), beaten, and her stomach was scalded with hot liquid. At this point, the judge asked if N had really been hung by her hands. In his statement, Anwar R said that the al-Khatib prison was not set up to do this. N confirmed her statement.

She remained in the communal cell for six days. Eventually, her mother was taken away – released, she thought at the time. Then an especially bad time in custody began for N; she had to pause several times because she was shaken recounting events. N described that she was transferred to a solitary cell where a guard sexually harassed her. When she thought she was losing her mind, she specifically asked to be taken to see Anwar R. She knew him from her sister’s detention the previous year; she and her parents had gone to see a high-ranking official to ask him to release the girl. “I knew he was the person responsible for this place, that’s why I wanted to see him,” the witness explained. She wanted to ask him to be returned to the communal cell. Her wish was not granted. The witness described Anwar R’s office, also based on drawings she had done previously for the German Criminal Police.

After a few days in the solitary cell, the witness was finally transferred, not to the collective cell, but to another solitary cell that housed her mother, who she believed was free.

After a total of 23 days, N’s mother was released, and N was transferred to Branch 285, where she spent several more weeks in detention.

The next day of the trial, which was scheduled for further questioning of the witness, began unexpectedly with a new statement from Anwar R. In it, he supplemented and corrected his previous statements (see trial report, day 5) regarding the witness and her sister’s detentions. The prosecution read both statements to the witness. When asked what she thought of Anwar R’s original and new statements, the witness reacted emotionally, even angrily. N made it crystal clear that neither of Anwar R’s statements reflect her experience or testimony from the previous day.

The defense asked the witness why she asked to see Anwar R during her detention to request a transfer to another cell. The witness said she was so desperate, she turned to the only person whose name she knew – despite knowing that he would not only have the power to transfer her, but to have her executed.

Witness A testified on days 65 and 66 of the al-Khatib trial. Even before his detention in the al-Khatib detention center, he knew the defendant Anwar R by sight, and had even filmed him at a funeral. He is also one of the witnesses who had been detained in March 2011 and described torture in al-Khatib at that time – prior to the crimes Anwar R is charged with in this trial. When the court asked if he recognized Anwar R, he pointed to the dock.

Witness A was a journalist in Syria, he first worked for the al-Hayat newspaper, and later for al-Nasar, which was classified as critical of the regime and banned in Syria. He mainly reported on art and social issues. In February 2011, a well-known Syrian director and his friend, died. The funeral was a significant event that a wide variety of people attended. Thus, in addition to many artists and opposition figures, secret service officials, politicians and military officers were also present. According to the witness, Anwar R, who was in charge of processing the artists’ files on the secret services, also attended the funeral. A filmed the entire event, so the defendant could also be seen in his video. The witness saved the video on his laptop.

A few weeks later, security officers entered the witness’ apartment and searched it. They took the witness to the al-Khatib Branch and confiscated personal items such as his laptop. Once at the detention center, the witness was forced to wait in a holding area. From there, he was led to another room where he had to strip naked and squat. After that, he was first locked in a single cell with other prisoners, and then in a larger, overcrowded cell.

A reported that at the time, torture in al-Khatib was largely similar to what witnesses who were detained later reported. Prisoners were woken up at night and forced to stand against the wall. They were tortured with electric shocks, whips, and the dulab and “flying carpet” methods. They were also handcuffed to the iron-barred windows to force them to stand for long periods.

During his interrogations, A was blindfolded and his hands tied behind his back. He was forced to lie on his stomach, and had to endure several people’s blows with cables to his back and head for hours. He was so injured in the process that he could not walk back to his cell. Instead, he had to crawl amid derisive laughter from the guards. At one point, he was threatened that he would be tortured with electric shocks to his genitals until he could no longer father children.

During a later interrogation, he was taken to a new “upscale” room where Anwar R personally questioned him about the funeral video. The witness was also tortured during this interrogation. Angered by the stored recording of the funeral, Anwar R himself reportedly punched the witness in the face during this process.

Day 64 of the al-Khatib trial was marked by the difficult circumstances witnesses can face in this and similar proceedings. At the beginning of the hearing, the senate read out excerpts from the email correspondence with the witness who was supposed to have testified in Koblenz that day – and in which she explained why she could not be present. She described that she was afraid for her own safety in Europe as well as her parents’ safety in Syria. She also explained that she did not feel psychologically stable enough to testify here in court. She said that she had to refuse a renewed request by the judges to testify in Koblenz even under protective measures, citing her mental health.

Instead, an officer of the Federal Criminal Police Office, who had questioned the witness in August 2019, testified that day. He reported that the witness had been summoned to the al-Khatib department “for a coffee” in the spring of 2012 after she was arrested at a demonstration in Damascus and was brutally questioned for more than six hours. In al-Khatib, she was initially made to wait in a barren room where there was a bed and where a young intelligence officer entered several times to check on her. She described a great fear of the “worst,” which the German police officer also understood as fear of a possible rape. However, he had not explicitly inquired about this.

Later, the witness had been taken to the office of Anwar R, whom all other intelligence officers addressed respectfully as sidi (German for “my lord”). She had had a “funny conversation” with R for over three hours, which she herself had also described as an “interrogation.” Anwar R primarily wanted information from her about the art and cultural scene in Syria because the witness had been active in it. During their conversation, other intelligence officers repeatedly entered the room.

One intelligence agent had come into the office with a message about the death of a detainee. Anwar R was supposed to authorize the removal of the body. According to the witness, he said, “Don’t bring him out today because tomorrow is Friday. Don’t bring him out until Saturday.” At that time, large opposition demonstrations always took place in Syria after Friday prayers. After the employee left the office, Anwar R had asked the witness if she was afraid and told her that “in such chaotic conditions, both the good guys and the bad guys die.”

During the policeman’s report on the conversation described by the witness, Anwar R took notes almost throughout. He smiled when the official presented a sketch of R’s office made by the Syrian witness and nodded to his lawyers.

After the official’s testimony, this day of trial ended.

On day 63 of the al-Khatib trial at the Koblenz Higher Regional Court, two Arabic-speaking media representatives were present to claim simultaneous interpretation of the proceedings. This was particularly practical as the court was announcing an important decision: cases of sexual violence in the al-Khatib Branch would now be tried as crime against humanity in the context of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population in Syria, and not – as before – as individual cases under German criminal law. In doing so, the court took a necessary step towards recognizing the enormous scale of targeted sexual violence in the Syrian regime’s detention centers. ECCHR and its partner lawyers had repeatedly emphasized that particularly witness testimonies during the trial had pointed to the systematic use of sexual violence as a method of torture in al-Khatib and elsewhere.

The necessity of this step was demonstrated not least by the testimony of the survivor scheduled for that day, who himself had been tortured in al-Khatib and elsewhere. The witness, who is also a joint plaintiff in the trial, had been detained and tortured several times after conflicts with the Assad regime and reported, among other things, mistreatment by the guards in al-Khatib with targeted blows and kicks to the detainees’ genital area.

As soon as he arrived at al-Khatib, the guards began to insult and beat the detainees and forced them to undress. After this “usual welcome procedure,” the witness was crammed into a crowded communal cell with about 100 other detainees. Among them were also students from a 10th grade class. Many prisoners in the filthy cell came down with fever and flu or had severe torture injuries. Elderly people suffering from pre-existing conditions were also in the cell. Medical care was almost never available.

During his 18-day detention in al-Khatib, the witness was interrogated several times. For this purpose, he was blindfolded and led into an anteroom of the interrogation room. He was tied up and forced to remain on his knees for several hours. During this time, he was beaten incessantly and heard the continuous screams from other prisoners. In addition, the witness reported torture of other detainees with electric shocks, batons and cables, as well as mistreatment and injuries on the head due to forced shavings. The witness himself fell ill with flu during time in al-Khatib, lost more than ten kilograms, and struggles to this day with the enormous psychological consequences of the torture.

At the end of the day, the senate noted that the taking of evidence in the case of Anwar R could come to an end in September 2021 – depending on the number of future requests for evidence.

Exactly two weeks ago, the Koblenz Higher Regional Court handed down the world’s first verdict on state torture in Syria, sentencing Eyad A to four and a half years in prison. On day 61 of the trial, the first since then, proceedings against the main defendant Anwar R continued without further ado.

A former laboratory employee from Syria who was imprisoned in al-Khatib was summoned to testify. His report coincided with previous witness statements – inhumane hygienic conditions in the detention center, beatings, forced nudity and torture. The man was housed in the so-called death cell – a dark room in which up to 140 people were locked up. There was no air to breathe, place to sleep, nor enough food or water. The detainees suffered from skin diseases and some lost their minds. The witness testified that he was interrogated twice in al-Khatib and beaten time and again.

Once again in the trial, it became clear how terrible the long-term consequences are for those who survive detention and torture in al-Khatib. The witness said that he continues to suffer from these mental and physical injuries. His voice broke when he spoke of his depression, sleeping disorders, tinnitus and the many pills he has to take every day. The presiding judge called a recess.

The witness emphasized that the worst thing for him was that he was imprisoned despite his innocence. As he endured this anguish, he asked himself over and over why he was there in the first place. The psychological pressure he continues to feel is much harder to bear than his physical suffering. “I am still living in that death cell. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the prisoners there,” he said. The man testified that his family has also endured this pressure and suffered indirectly from the torture he experienced in al-Khatib.

The witness was then dismissed. The impact being detained in al-Khatib resonated throughout the courtroom.

On day 62, a relatively short trial day, another survivor testified. This witness remained anonymous: he did not have to provide any information about himself and was allowed to cover his face with a mask, because the court believed the safety of his family in Syria was threatened.

This witness was detained in al-Khatib in May 2012. Like previous witnesses, he described humiliations and beatings at so-called welcome parties and “collective torture.” When faced with such conditions in detention, he “went crazy” at some point. He banged on the door of his cell and screamed – he just wanted to sleep. A guard ordered him to lie down next to the cell’s squat toilet, which other inmates had to use continuously, even while he was lying there.

At some point, he completely lost touch with reality because everything around him felt so surreal, he said. The way he recounted this substantiates his story. He jumped from event to event; there was a lot he could not remember exactly.

The judges explicitly asked him about a particularly painful detail of his arrest – the man said that he had been sexually assaulted. Guards had stuck a gun barrel and finger into his anus and fondled his chest and hair. The witness then reported, trembling, that the majority of prisoners he had been in contact with in al-Khatib had also been sexually assaulted. Guards would stand very close behind them, play with their nipples and stroke them behind the ear. The witness said, “In the culture I come from, it is very difficult to talk about this.” He did not believe that anyone would actually admit in court to being sexually abused.

In response, Sebastian Scharmer, ECCHR partner lawyer who represents the joint plaintiffs, said that this testimony proves again that sexual violence has been part of the targeted attack on Syrian civilians.

Many Syrians and torture survivors, those involved in the trial and countless others, have been waiting for this day of the al-Khatib trial – the day defendant Eyad A was to be sentenced. This would be the first time that a former member of the Syrian secret service would be convicted of crimes under international law. The day’s enormous significance could already be felt that morning outside the courthouse. Even before dawn, a long line formed in front of the Koblenz Higher Regional Court. At the very front stood Syrian prison survivors who are witnesses and joint plaintiffs in the trial against Anwar R. The courtroom was full as the trial began; the tension palpable.

Notably, the presiding judge ordered consecutive Arabic interpretation be provided to the public today. This was an important decision for the Syrian survivors present, and a symbolically significant one for future proceedings. Without further ado, the presiding judge opened the trial and read the verdict. The court found Eyad A guilty of crimes against humanity in 30 cases of aiding and abetting torture and aggravated deprivation of liberty, and sentenced him to four and a half years in prison.

The reasoning followed. The presiding judge first briefly outlined Eyad A’s life and described his many years of service in various branches of the Syrian General Intelligence Service. She recounted political developments in Syria, from Hafiz al-Assad seizing power in 1970 to the current Assad regime’s massacre in Homs in March 2012.

The judge recounted how Hafiz al-Assad “established an atmosphere of mutual distrust and spying on the population” through the arbitrariness of his intelligence services, a system that his son Bashar – after a brief period of détente during the Damascus Spring – took over and used to maintain his own grip on power. She then spoke in detail about events in Syria from 2011 to 2012. From the Syrian regime’s first arrests during the March 2011 demonstrations, it quickly militarized its response to protests and increasingly used lethal force against civilians. Here, the judge mentioned evidence presented in court, especially expert witness testimony by ECCHR partner lawyers Mazen Darwish and Anwar al-Bunni.

The Syrian intelligence services carried out more and more raids over the summer of 2011, arbitrarily arresting and violently intimidating people, the judge told the court. At the time, she said, orders were given from the highest levels “not to be too lax.” The judgment quoted an April 2011 decree from the highest secret service coordination office that said “[t]he phase of tolerance is over.”

The judge used vivid examples to illustrate how the Syrian intelligence services used deception from fall 2011 to try to paint the Syrian regime as a victim of terrorists to the international community. For example, weapons were planted on peaceful protestors at demonstrations to justify the security forces’ violence, and soldiers were shown to foreign media in the hospital with fake injuries.

She then shared her conclusions about the role of the intelligence services starting in 2011, in particular, that of al-Khatib, General Intelligence Service Branch 251’s detention facility – where Eyad A worked in Subdivision 40. At the beginning of 2011, the intelligence services’ systematic arrests and torture still aimed to gather information. Towards the end of the year, the main goal had changed to intimidate and physically destroy detainees. Torture, especially violent beatings with cables, hoses and pipes, as well as systematically disastrous hygienic conditions, were used deliberately. Men and women were housed separately in overcrowded single and communal cells without daylight or adequate supplies. Beatings and the screams of those being tortured could be heard at all times. The judge particularly highlighted “welcome parties,” during which prison guards beat new inmates with cables and hoses, sometimes until they fainted, before locking them in their cells.

The verdict also stated that the bodies of murdered detainees were collected in military hospitals and transported in refrigerated trucks to mass graves. The corpses were photographed to prove the detainees had not been released. Some of these “Caesar photos” were used as evidence in the trial (see report 41/42). The judge emphasized the importance of this evidence. The Caesar Files Group, mediated by ECCHR, shared these high-resolution photos with the German authorities. In 6821 photos, the bodies could be clearly assigned to people. At this point, the judge became personal and said, “I will not forget these pictures.”

Only after she outlined the court’s findings on the overall offence – the “widespread and systematic attack” on demonstrators – which are important to generally assess the crimes, did the judge describe the concrete circumstances of the crime of which Eyad A was convicted. On 9 October 2011, he participated in a “rapid intervention force in the field” in the pursuit and arrest of peaceful demonstrators and transport of at least two buses, carrying 15 detainees each, to Branch 251. The number of those tortured, the judge made clear, should be estimated as low as possible in favor of the defendant. In reality, there could have been significantly more.

Since the judges were unable to establish that Eyad A participated in torture at the “welcome party,” he was only convicted of 30 cases of aiding and abetting torture and aggravated deprivation of liberty. As a long-time intelligence service employee, Eyad A had known about the catastrophic conditions and torture in Branch 251. According to his own testimony, he had even been able to “hear the screams of the tortured all the way in the cafeteria” – and nevertheless had transported the detainees there.

However, the court found that Eyad A had incriminated himself in his statements to the German police and Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. In addition, he had defected from the regime at a relatively early stage. The judge said it should not be forgotten that his statements provided evidence of considerable importance in the trial of Anwar R. Among other things, he had reported killings in the al-Khatib Branch, which probably would not have been substantiated without his statements.

This was the first court ruling worldwide to find “there has been a widespread and systematic attack on the civilian population in Syria since at least the end of April 2011.” An important day for the principle of universal jurisdiction and its application, and a major step in addressing the Syrian regime’s systematic crimes against humanity.

After the verdict, Wassim Mukdad, a joint plaintiff in the case against Anwar R, told journalists gathered in front of the court, “The ruling opens a window of hope for Syrians who are fighting for their freedom, then and now. It is not the individual sentence against Eyad A that makes this verdict a historic step towards justice for Syria. The historic aspect is that it is the world’s first judicial recognition of the Syrian regime’s systematic crimes against humanity.”

This day of the al-Khatib trial began without much ado with the closing statement of Eyad A’s lawyers. Confused murmurs rippled through the gallery, which only had a few occupied seats, when one of the lawyers started by reading a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. The lawyer said he had had a dream that humanity had learned from the crimes in history. However, he said, one can see that in Syria, this is not the case. The gravest crimes were, and continue to be, committed there.

If the defendant Eyad A had been involved in these crimes, the defense would give an appropriate closing statement. This “fictitious plea” would factor in the possible range of the sentence for these crimes, meaning how long Eyad A would have to go to prison. This range would be based on the alleged crime – aiding and abetting torture. But it would also have to take into account that Eyad A had contributed important information in defendant Anwar R’s case (which is being tried separately since 17 February; see trial report 60). In the lawyer’s opinion, R was only charged because of Eyad A’s witness statement to the German Federal Criminal Police. In addition, A’s behavior after the alleged crime would have to be considered. He had defected from the regime, felt great compassion in response to the Caesar photos, and even apologized to the victims of the Syrian regime in his letter.

As his defense lawyer spoke, Eyad A first listened intently to the interpretation, but seemed to increasingly fall apart. He started to cry when his lawyer asked the judges if the public prosecution’s requested sentence would be as high if Eyad A had not spoken with the Federal Criminal Police, but had only another witness’s testimony instead. This was the first time in the trial that the defendant showed so much emotion.

The lawyer continued: it was not possible for the defendant to simply evade his superiors’ orders, including those of notorious Hafiz Makhlouf, as the prosecution claimed. Everyone involved in the trial knew from the evidence presented in court that the penalty in Syria for disobeying orders or desertion was death. Eyad A had not worked for Subdivision 40 because he was “bored of office work” as the prosecution asserted, but because he had been “ordered” to do so. The defendant was not a torturer, but a father who wanted to protect his family. But all of this would only be relevant in this fictitious sentence, the lawyer said. Eyad A’s case was not a matter of sentencing; he asked that Eyad A be acquitted.

The reasoning followed after a short break, when Eyad A’s second defense lawyer took the floor. He invoked the Befehlsnotstand (necessity to obey orders), which the prosecution mentioned in its their closing argument the day before (see trial report 60). The prosecution said that since the Nuremberg Trials, defendants have invoked this in almost all proceedings about international crimes. However, it also said that this has almost never been successful. It requires a high threshold, which is rarely reached because people, like the accused, put themselves in a position in which a criminal regime had authority over them.

Eyad A’s defense lawyer nevertheless claimed that the defendant had had no choice but to obey his superiors’ orders. He could not have been expected to put his and his family’s lives at risk. The Syrian regime relentlessly pursued defectors and deliberately threatened its employees’ families to ensure their obedience. The intelligence apparatus’ routine procedures had made it impossible for Eyad A to leave the country undetected while the crimes were being committed. Thus, he had had no choice but to wait for an opportunity to escape, which did not arise until several months later.

A brief outline of Eyad A’s life followed: he was the son of a soldier; Syrian society was already militarized during his youth, even children were indoctrinated in school. The intelligence services were often the only place where social advancement was possible, and when his father died, Eyad A became the main breadwinner in his family. As a young father of four children and with a pregnant wife, why would he have volunteered for the brutal and dangerous work in Subdivision 40 in 2011?

Lastly, the lawyer said that the court should be aware of the signal its ruling will send. What message does it want to send to other former intelligence officers who later defected from the regime and could also serve as witnesses in this and other trials? Does it want to scare them off with a harsh sentence? And what sign does it want to give to everyone still in Syria who is thinking about deserting and fleeing the country? Eyad A deserted only five months “too late” in a conflict that was to last for years to come.

During the second half of the defense’s closing argument, the defendant’s dismay showed despite his wearing a mask. He barely tried to hold back his tears; his interpreter slid him a couple of tissues. He was then given the last word before the ruling. He composed himself and said, “I have nothing to add to the words of my defense lawyers.”

The verdict will be announced on 24 February. The presiding judge agreed to provide another 11 seats in the gallery, so there will be about 45 seats, approximately 20 of which are reserved for the media.

Friendly Rhineland court officers were still setting up the technology in Room 120 of the Koblenz Higher Regional Court when the first members of the public arrived for day 60 of the al-Khatib trial. Shortly before the trial began, two court employees escorted Eyad A to his seat, his handcuffs clicking loudly as they were opened. The atmosphere in the court was still relaxed; a few rays of sunlight shone through the windows, which were open in the bright, large room. But it was not long before a tense silence fell over the courtroom when the judges appeared. Today, it was to be decided whether defendant Eyad A’s trial would be separated – and what prison sentence the prosecution would seek.

First the judges read three documents that the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a non-governmental organization that investigates crimes under international law (see trial reports 43-44), received from Syria. The documents were faxes the Syrian authorities had sent in 2011: newsletters urging intelligence service employees to crack down on the civilian opposition more severely and violently. At that time, there were already concrete plans of how to suppress so-called armed gangs. One letter made clear that “(t)he phase of tolerance is over.”

With this, the hearing of evidence against Eyad A was concluded, and the public prosecutor’s request to separate his trial from Anwar R’s was granted, the presiding judge announced. She then interrupted Anwar R’s trial, which will continue on 10 March with further evidence and witness testimony.

This was followed by the public prosecution’s closing statement. Representatives of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office began at the very beginning, with the Arab Spring. The prosecution made clear how brutal the Syrian government was against members of the opposition – even before 2011. But after protests broke out, attacks on the Syrian civilian population became even harsher and more systematic. Today, the senior federal prosecutor said, people who had resisted the regime were still so afraid of persecution that they only wanted to testify in this trial anonymously or not at all. He explained the important role Syrian torture survivors and witnesses played in the proceedings. Thanking them, especially the photographer “Caesar,” he stated that they had his “utmost respect.”

In its closing statement, the prosecution said that Germany is conducting this trial on crimes against humanity in the interest of the international community, which must not allow torture to go unpunished. Germany cannot be a refuge for people who have committed crimes under international law. The trial in Koblenz is only the beginning, the senior federal prosecutor told the court. Further trials on the crimes in Syria will follow. He said, “Koblenz is the beginning of the punishment for this injustice. Crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations.”

The senior federal prosecutor then reminded the court of Eyad A’s alleged crimes. He joined the Syrian General Intelligence Service at age 20, and in February 2010 was transferred to Branch 251 – the al-Khatib Branch. Later, because he became “bored with clerical work,” he joined Subdivision 40, which was notorious for its particularly brutal treatment of prisoners. It should have been clear to Eyad A that part of his job there would be to severely crack down on civilians. One day in September or October 2011, he violently broke up a demonstration with other security officers and helped hunt down and arrest 30 people, whom they took to the al-Khatib torture prison. The senior federal prosecutor said that from March 2011 until at least that time, torture and abuse was an everyday occurrence in al-Khatib, which the defendant must have known about and accepted. Eyad A did not try to evade these orders, even though in theory, he could have. Although he later showed compassion and distanced himself from the regime, Eyad A had simply been part of it for too long.

However, the prosecution noted that it is important that Eyad A is not on trial as a representative of the regime. His individual case must determine the verdict. Nevertheless, only with contributions like his was the Syrian regime’s terror possible at all; as a cog in the wheel, he had helped keep the system running.

During its remarks, the prosecution again detailed the atrocities described in the trial, the terrible conditions in Syrian intelligence service detention centers, and the “almost industrial dimensions” that the killing machine had taken under Assad. There was no doubt about the systematic nature of the crimes. The prosecution supported its argument with the testimonies of torture survivors, particularly emphasizing those of lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, lawyer and journalist Mazen Darwish, Caesar, and witness Z28/07/16, and made it clear that other witnesses would testify in Anwar R’s trial. The prosecution said, “All of the testimonies of formerly imprisoned witnesses were absolutely credible. They relived those injustices here. The horror was written on their faces. They survived that horror, but have not overcome it.”

After giving their closing statement for almost four hours, the prosecution concluded that it is seeking a prison term of five and a half years for Eyad A.

On day 59 of the al-Khatib trial, the Koblenz Higher Regional Court heard from the German Federal Criminal Police officer who leads the investigation into Anwar R’s case. He already testified earlier in the trial (see trial report 2). Today, he spoke about his questioning of witness “AA,” which he conducted in the course of his investigation. AA, who traveled from Sweden to Berlin in August 2018 for the interview, was not prepared to testify in court himself, even after several requests. Therefore, the court summoned the officer again to indirectly hear about the witness’ testimony.

The chief detective told the parties to the trial and the six people sitting in the gallery that AA was detained for 58-60 days in the al-Khatib Branch in 2011. There, he was interrogated and severely tortured. His statements were unique. For one thing, the witness was one of the first survivors to be interviewed in the pre-trial proceedings. For another, AA personally saw the main defendant Anwar R in al-Khatib several times, and identified him in a photograph “with a fair degree of certainty” during his questioning in Germany.

The officer recounted how the Federal Criminal Police had contacted AA in summer 2018 via an ECCHR partner lawyer. The witness struggled during his questioning, and obviously found the situation extremely stressful. Above all, he was concerned that Anwar R would learn the content of his testimony, which could be why he did not want to testify in court.

This testimony made it clear to the courtroom why the experience was so stressful for AA. He was an activist, particularly online, when he was arrested in February 2011. AA was interrogated almost fifty times in al-Khatib, where he was tortured severely on several occasions, including using the dulab and shabeh methods. His feet were beaten bloody, parts of his skin burned, and he was tortured with electric shocks. From his cell, he often witnessed others being tortured – he could always hear other prisoners’ screams.

AA had contact with the defendant Anwar R twice. Once, AA was mistakenly led to a room in al-Khatib’s basement, which he thought was Anwar R’s office. On another occasion, he was taken to Anwar R after he had been tortured in order to identify someone in a photograph. He was not blindfolded either time, so he was able to catch a glimpse of the defendant, who yelled at him to look at the ground. On one occasion, Anwar R threatened that if AA did not look away, he would “destroy him.” After his release, AA learned that this man was Anwar R. He also recognized R’s voice in a radio interview, and, after researching it, was able to put a face to the voice.

Another survivor testified on day 58 of the trial. Since 2011, the man coordinated anti-government demonstrations in Raqqa, and with other activists, called on people to demonstrate. In May 2011, the Military Intelligence arrested him for the first time for several days. He was later detained again for a month, this time by the Criminal Police. His third arrest by Syrian security forces took place in May 2012, when he was detained for months in several cities: Raqqa, Deir-Zour, Homs, and finally, Damascus. There, the witness was first placed in the al-Khatib Branch for several days, then in the Palestine Branch. After a predetermined “trial,” he was released.

The witness spoke in detail about his detention in al-Khatib. The Military Police took him there, and like many other detainees, he was greeted with a “welcome party” where they beat and intimidated him. Then he and other detainees were forced to hand over their belongings, undress and squat so that the guards could search them. More beatings followed with batons and leather objects. The witness was taken to a three-by-five-meter cell, which already housed nearly 100 other detainees. A strong, unpleasant odor overpowered the cell. There was sometimes rice or potatoes to eat. To drink, there was a plastic bottle of water – for all 100 prisoners.

The witness could see fellow inmates’ injuries and swelling. He saw wounds on their wrists: traces of the shabeh torture method, in which prisoners are hung by their hands. The witness could hear other prisoners’ screams at all hours of the day. Female voices were also present, he said.
He was interrogated twice in al-Khatib, the witness testified. For this purpose, he was blindfolded and led to another room. During his first interrogation, two officers asked him general questions about his activities and participation in demonstrations, while beating him all over his body. During the second interrogation, two security officers were again present in the room, as well as another person with a coastal dialect. This third person asked the questions, which made the witness suspect that the man might be the supervisor. The witness was also beaten during this interrogation.

From al-Khatib, the witness was taken to the Palestine Branch for another three months. The violence he experienced throughout his detention in the various branches permanently damaged him. “To call this experience frightening would be far too mild ... it was terrible,” the witness concluded.

Day 57 of the al-Khatib trial was the first to take place in the renovated courtroom 120 of the Koblenz Higher Regional Court. A beautiful room with high ceilings, it has two staircases behind the judges’ bench leading to a small library. Although this courtroom is somewhat smaller than the last, the acoustics were worse. The sound technicians assured the court that they would fix the problem.

Originally, a survivor who now lives in France was scheduled to testify. However, he was unable to travel for personal reasons. Therefore, the presiding judge continued the trial with testimony from the German police officer “H,” who recorded the witness’ testimony to the German Federal Criminal Police. H explained that the witness was originally questioned by French authorities as part of structural investigations there.

H described the course of events and content of the German police interrogation of the survivor in detail. The officer did not know the content of the French interrogation. Syrian security officers contacted the Syrian witness in May 2011 and asked him to report in person to their offices. When the man arrived there the next day, the security officers questioned him about some of his Facebook posts that were critical of the regime. Although the man was then allowed to leave, he was asked to come back the following day.

The next day, he was taken by car to a detention center – later, he learned that it was the al-Khatib Branch. Upon arrival, the detainee was searched, beaten, and placed in a small solitary cell. The first night, he was “interrogated.” An officer questioned him again about his Facebook posts, and about his contacts abroad and with the opposition. The next day, he was “interrogated” again, this time by another officer. The officer asked him for his Facebook password, which the detainee shared. Later, he was beaten with whips and fists, and kicked on his head, feet and elsewhere. Over the course of his detention, he repeatedly heard the loud screams of men and women. Three days after his arrest, he was transferred. He was later “acquitted” and released at the Palace of Justice in Damascus. In April 2012, the man was detained again, this time for a month by the Air Force Intelligence Service.

H reported that during the German police’s conversation with the survivor, he drew a sketch of the rooms in al-Khatib, which the court displayed.

Later, the judges read out an expert opinion from the Max Planck Institute regarding how Syrian criminal law defines murder, manslaughter and bodily harm. The offenses charged in this trial in Germany would be also punishable in Syria as murder and (grievous) bodily harm with a sentence of long-term to life imprisonment, or even the death penalty. However, this is only true in theory. Under President Bashar al-Assad’s protection, the intelligence services have sweeping immunity.

Then the judges read their decision on the defense’s motion for evidence from 9 December. The defense had requested that a handwriting expert confirm the authenticity of a letter from Eyad A (see trial report day 50). The judges decided that they assumed A wrote the letter himself, and no graphological analysis was required.

This was followed by a statement from the presiding judge that many had been waiting for. The court accepted the Federal Prosecutor Office’s request to separate the trial against Eyad A. On 17 and 18 February, the court will deal exclusively with the case against Eyad A, as long as nothing significant arises before then. On 17 February, the hearing of evidence will be closed, and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office will deliver its closing statement. The defendant’s plea and closing statement is scheduled for 18 February. The verdict will probably be announced on 24 February. The scheduled trial dates for Anwar R will be cancelled during this period and will resume on 10 March.

Day 56 of the trial began with another reading of the Human Rights Watch report We’ve never seen such horror about detainees’ torture and abuse, targeted arrests and disappearances, as well as executions and mass graves.

Then the court heard testimony from a Federal Criminal Police Chief Detective. In the course of the Federal Criminal Police investigations, the witness looked at defendant Eyad A’s cellphone and corresponding memory card. On it were four photos, which the court examined: an excerpt from the family register and corresponding German translation, as well as the front and back of an identity card. The latter identified Eyad A as a General Intelligence Service employee in Branch 251.

Subsequently, the court read the translation of a letter from Eyad A. He wrote the letter by hand in reaction to the Caesar photos evidence. In it, he describes his emotional state during and after the day of the trial during which forensic pathologist Markus Rothschild testified on the Caesar photos and they were shown in the courtroom (see trial report day 41/42).

Eyad A wrote that he was pained and saddened for the victims and their relatives, and that he respected Rothschild’s important work. He did not understand how such acts could have occurred and affirmed that he had not known about the pictures. He is missing imprisoned and abducted family members himself. Full of fear, he searched for them in the pictures. He now condemns the regime. Eyad A also described how after the revolution began in spring 2011, he had been treated with suspicion within the intelligence service because of his Sunni background. Therefore, in order to protect his family and himself, he had had no other option but to obey orders and wait for a suitable opportunity to escape. The letter did not explain, however, why he joined the notorious Subdivision 40 or provide information about his high-ranking commanders, such as Anwar R.

After the letter was read, the defense explained its motion from the previous day to hear another expert witness. The Federal Public Prosecutor and lawyers for the joint plaintiffs objected.

The trial will continue from 27 January in the Koblenz Higher Regional Courthouse’s remodeled Room 120.

Day 55 of the al-Khatib trial began with questioning a survivor who recounted his detention in various branches, including al-Khatib. This witness was allowed to testify anonymously because he feared for his relatives’ safety in Syria.

The witness was first arrested in 2011 in connection with a demonstration in Damascus. At the time, he was traveling with a group of activists who took part in peaceful protests against the Assad regime. Suddenly, shots were fired. People dressed as civilians dragged him and others into a minibus where they were kicked and beaten. The activists were blindfolded and their hands tied. They were taken to Subdivision 40, where they had to wait lined up against a wall. During their subsequent interrogation, the prison staff tortured them with electric shocks and other methods.

Later, the witness was taken to the al-Khatib Branch. When he was searched shortly after his arrival, the guards’ abused him so brutally that he lost consciousness. They then took him to a basement that smelled strongly of blood and alcohol to be interrogated. There the witness was repeatedly beaten, kicked and whipped with a cable.

One particularly horrible memory still torments the witness today, he said. A younger prisoner, about 15 years old, who sat with him in the minibus to Subdivision 40, was beaten on his back by the security forces with a stick spiked with nails. The witness saw the boy again in the al-Khatib interrogation basement, where he was also abused.

The witness spent the rest of his detention in a too small communal cell. People in obviously poor health were also detained there; one suffered from epilepsy. After about a week, the witness was transferred to another General Intelligence Service detention facility, where he was detained in a group cell for 21 days. He reported regular “visits” by the guards, during which they arbitrarily selected prisoners and brutally beat them – even very old people. Due to persistent screams from other cells, the witness was rarely able to sleep.

In April 2012, the witness was arrested again while working with other activists on a political project. When armed security forces stormed their office building, the activists tried to hide their work and threw their laptops and tablets out of the window, to no avail. He was taken to Subdivision 40 again, where he was interrogated twice and abused. Between interrogations, he was taken to a basement to be tortured.
 
The witness was then returned to al-Khatib, where he spent his first five days in a hallway and was treated “normally,” since no one knew why he had been captured. After that, he was taken to a cell with about 200 other inmates, which resembled a converted cafeteria. Following an initial interrogation, he was moved to a new cell with more than 60 people crammed into about 20 square meters. It was impossible to sit or lie down. The witness said that because of this, he “slept” standing up for three or four days. He recounted that under these conditions, people lost their minds or became sick. He had a very high fever for several days.

The witness’ account of a boy about 14 years old with whom he shared a cell was harrowing. The boy was detained when the authorities were looking for his brother. For two days, guards took the boy out of his cell every 30 minutes and beat him, mainly on the soles of his feet and legs.

The witness then located the sites of the various prisons on sketches, some of which he had drawn, and was dismissed.

The court continued reading Human Rights Watch’s report We’ve never seen such horror about the protests in Daraa and the security forces’ response, as well as the denial of medical assistance for the injured. At the end of the day, the defense initiated a discussion on convening another expert witness, but this was postponed until the following day.

On the first day of the trial after the holiday break, the presiding judge asked if Arabic-speaking journalists who need simultaneous interpretation were present. As in the weeks before, no one answered, so she said she would stop asking, since by now, everyone should know about this option. For the Arabic-speaking journalists in the gallery, the question was frustrating, as they would have liked to make use of the translation, but were denied it due to their lack of accreditation.

The witness called testified that he survived torture in the al-Khatib Branch. His descriptions were impressive and precise, and he clearly distinguished what he remembered exactly and when his memory was foggy.

The Syrian reported that when the intelligence service arrested him, he was accused of taking part in demonstrations against the Bashar al-Assad government – which was not yet true. After a stop at a location unknown to him, he was then taken to al-Khatib. Many others from his village were arrested and imprisoned on the same day. Like previous witnesses, he said that he was “greeted” in al-Khatib with beatings and locked in a small cell with many others. The conditions in detention were terrible. The food was just enough to keep prisoners from starving to death. The witness was beaten on his feet, legs and stomach. The injuries to his leg are still visible today.

The witness testified that he had heard other prisoners’ screams almost continuously. In particular, he remembered a man of about 70 years old who was tortured despite having high blood pressure. He also said he met a young boy in al-Khatib whom he had taken care of. The boy had been no older than 12 or 13 and had a gunshot wound to his leg. Despite asking for treatment several times and guards having seen his injury, the boy was denied medical care and even tortured.

After the witness was dismissed, the Office of the Federal Prosecutor requested that the trial against Eyad A be separated. The prosecutors said that they believe all necessary evidence against Eyad A will have been presented by the second half of February, and that a verdict could be reached on 24 or 25 February. The trial of the main defendant, Anwar R, would then continue.

After other statements by the prosecutors, the trial continued with the reading of the Human Rights Watch report We’ve never seen such horror. The report deals with the systematic killing and torture of civilians, especially during and after demonstrations in the city of Daraa in 2011.

The following day of the trial was significantly shorter. A chief detective was invited to report on Federal Criminal Police investigations into mass graves in Syria.

The Federal Criminal Police investigated after witness “Z 30/07/19,” who testified on day 30 and 31 of this trial (see previous trial reports), spoke about mass graves, including in al-Quteifah, during police questioning. Since this witness was able to describe the geographical location of the mass graves, the investigators were able to confirm their existence at the described location using Google Maps and Apple’s image service. On the satellite images, they could see pits about 100 meters long and an object that resembled an excavator. The police considered this confirmation that mass graves existed. With the help of additional satellite images from the German Aerospace Center, the police were also able to track changes in soil locations. The corresponding geocoordinates can still be entered on Apple, where today, one can see filled-in trenches surrounded by a wall. Multiple witnesses have also testified that there are other mass graves. Federal Criminal Police investigations into this matter are ongoing.

On day 52 of the Syria trial, a survivor testified about her time as a detainee in al-Khatib. Her lawyer requested that she be allowed to testify anonymously and partially covered by a cloth. Her testimony could endanger her family, who lives within the regime’s sphere of influence in Syria. The court granted the request and allowed her to omit information that could be used to identify her.

The witness testified that on 29 May 2012, she had merely met five friends to discuss politics and ideologies. Suddenly, a group of armed men stormed the office in Damascus where they were meeting and arrested the witness and her friends. The friends were blindfolded and she was ordered to look at the floor. They were first taken to Branch 40, where the others were tortured and beaten “in greeting.” One of her friends was tormented with electric shocks.

The next day, she was taken alone to al-Khatib (Branch 251), where she spent several weeks in a tiny cell with a pregnant prisoner. They had to sleep on lice-ridden blankets and hardly had any fresh air. They were only allowed to use the dirty toilets at certain times. On her way to the toilet, she could see other detainees’ bloody feet. She was only given food twice a day, and it was often moldy. She recounted how at night, she often heard the horrible screams of detainees who were being brutally tortured. She heard these screams all the time in Branch 251, she said.

Later, she was transferred to a communal cell with about two dozen women. The cell was stuffy, unhygienic and infested with cockroaches. The cockroaches were removed with chemicals, but the women almost suffocated from the poisonous gases.

The witness was not tortured herself, but many of her cellmates were brutally beaten. Her case was therefore special: she was aware that she had been treated less cruelly in al-Khatib than many others. She did not want to reveal why, as it would jeopardize her anonymity.

She was interrogated once while in al-Khatib, but refused to reveal any information, even when she was threatened with whippings. She testified that her interrogators were neither Anwar R nor Eyad A.

Following the witness’ testimony, the court read a statement by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office regarding a motion by Patrick Kroker and Sebastian Scharmer, ECCHR partner lawyers who represent joint plaintiffs. In the motion, they demand that sexual violence not be treated as individual cases, but as part of the crime against humanity with which the main defendant Anwar R is charged. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office did not challenge the motion and agreed that sexual violence has been, and continues to be, used systematically in Syria.

A survivor traveled all the way from Norway to testify about his torture in the al-Khatib Branch on day 51 of the trial. The witness told the court that he had severe injuries from another prison when he arrived at al-Khatib. Nevertheless, he reported that he was regularly beaten there, especially on his severely wounded back. He was continuously covered in so much blood that he began to stink, he said. In his cell, which he was forced to share with up to 400 people, he was put in the corner because his stench was so strong – and because it was so painful to be touched. He was mostly unclothed because his clothes were completely soaked in blood. The cell’s only ventilation was in the room with the toilet, so some of his fellow prisoners went to the toilet to get some air. At one point, the others knocked on the door and asked for help because he smelled so awful. Even during his interrogations, the guards could no longer stand his stench and threw him into the yard, where he was beaten and kicked by everyone who passed by. On that occasion, he had been able to observe how new prisoners were brought to al-Khatib and beaten.

During his interrogations, a higher-ranking officer complained that his office was being soiled with blood and asked the guards to continue “educating” the prisoner outside because he had not given the desired answers to the officer’s questions. This interrogator told him at some point after several interrogations that he would be transferred to a hospital.

After five or six days in the al-Khatib Branch, he was taken to a military hospital in the suburb of Harasta. The hospital did not offer respite, however; he was tortured even more severely. He was placed in a room with around 20 beds and about two prisoners chained to each bed. There he was beaten further, sometimes with a whip. At night, more guards arrived to continue the beatings. The witness said he was even tortured with a knife. More prisoners died every day. The witness was regularly unconscious. When people complained about pain in their hand, for example, it was simply chopped off.

The witness described this military “hospital” as a place where the intelligence services sent severely injured prisoners to let them die or torture them to death. Medical treatment was never provided. Finally, at some point, he was simply thrown out onto the street, where a cab driver miraculously found him alive but seriously injured and covered with flies, and returned him to his family.

His family took him to a doctor who told him there was nothing he could do for him and that he should leave the country as soon as possible. His family drove the witness to Jordan the next day, where he stayed in a special clinic for several months and underwent multiple surgeries. A picture of his back was then shown, which the Norwegian Criminal Police took when he was questioned in 2017. Six years after his torture and despite the operations, his back was covered with scars.

During his testimony, an increasingly horrified silence spread across the courtroom. By the end, even the presiding judge was at a loss for words. The hearing was interrupted for breaks several times. The prosecution, defense and joint plaintiff lawyers waived asking the witness additional questions in order not to burden him further.

Contrary to expectations, day 50 of the trial continued as planned with all judges present. The week before, one judge was suspected of having contracted COVID-19. This turned out not to be the case, so a survivor who was detained in the al-Khatib branch in 2011 was able to testify. The man worked as a doctor in Syria and was arrested under false pretenses in August 2011.

Once in al-Khatib, the witness was forced to undress. His feet were beaten with cables during several interrogations. For the first few days, he was detained in a single cell without windows. This had the “advantage” that he could lie down, but it felt like he was in a tomb. Later, he was placed in a communal cell. Like other former prisoners, he reported disastrous conditions. His cell was often so crowded, with up to 40 detainees, that there was no room to lie down. Many had to sleep sitting up. He described a special sleeping position the detainees had used to take up the least room possible.

He reported that most of the prisoners’ wounds were left untreated. Lice had spread everywhere. His feet were so swollen by the beatings that standing and walking was painful. He was threatened and told that he would not be able to have any more children. Other detainees’ loud screams could be heard throughout the prison. The witness also lost 10 to 12 kilograms during his imprisonment, as there was not enough food. His family never received an official confirmation of his detention. After al-Khatib, he was transferred to two other prisons before he was finally released.

After the witness testified, the defense filed a motion to submit evidence – a handwriting expert’s confirmation that the defendant Eyad A wrote a specific letter to his defense attorneys. In the letter, Eyad A gave his opinion on the Caesar photos introduced into the trial in November 2020. He described that the pictures of the dead had stunned him, and moved him to tears on the way back to his German prison. He thanked Caesar, who had become a hero by making the photos public. Eyad A wrote that in 2011, in light of the revolution and regime’s crimes, he was faced with the choice of directly refusing orders, which would have resulted in his certain death. He could have fled the country immediately, but would have had to leave his family behind. He wrote that to protect his family, he decided to wait until the opportunity arose to flee together in 2012. He asked the judges how much it mattered that he wanted to protect his family, not just in his case, but for all future soldiers in whose country a revolution breaks out and face the same decision. He thanked the judges, prosecutors, his defense lawyers, and especially the witnesses who testified about the Syrian state’s crimes of torture, as well as those who continue to persevere in Syria with the hope of democracy and peace, and continue to expose themselves to a regime that tortures people.

His letter did not mention his own role, however. According to the indictment, as a senior official of subdivision 40, he is charged with being responsible for arresting many people and deliberately taking them to a department in al-Khatib that tortured and murdered detainees.

His defense lawyers asserted that Eyad A wrote this letter without their assistance. However, when the presiding judge asked if the defendant could confirm that he wrote the letter, the defense counsel stated that Eyad A would continue to remain silent. The Federal Public Prosecutor replied that for a comparative graphological expert opinion, one would ultimately need comparative material, which is not available.

Days 48 and 49 of the Syria trial, the Koblenz Higher Regional Court heard testimony from a deserted secret service employee. At first, the witness seemed nervous and answered questions evasively. The longer the questioning lasted, however, the more relaxed he seemed.

It soon became clear that the witness had extensive knowledge about the Syrian General Intelligence Service. He reported that he had worked in various of its departments for 30 years. From 2011, when the protests against the Syrian regime began, until he deserted and fled to Germany, he worked in the secret service’s administration. Therefore, he is familiar with the al-Khatib torture prison. The judges asked him share his insider knowledge with the court.

The witness named the decision-makers who headed al-Khatib in 2011 and 2012: head of the branch Major General Taufiq Younis and head of its interrogation department Colonel Anwar R. Anwar R’s task was to gather information “in any way possible.” However, important decisions (such as those regarding mass arrests) were made by Colonel Hafiz Makhlouf, who the witness described as “Assad’s administrator,” and was the head of intelligence at the General Secret Service Damascus branch. Taleb Hassan from the Alawite minority assisted Anwar R in organizing and conducting interrogations. An important point for the witness was that, at least since the revolution broke out, the Assad government only trusted Alawites. A person’s religious affiliation was greatly important to the regime.

The witness then shared his deep insights into the General Intelligence Service’s administrative apparatus. Other secret service departments sent documents to the General Intelligence’s administration where they were digitalized and entered into databases. Many of the documents were about torture and deaths. The witness described a typical interrogation order. If superiors made “suggestions for extended information retrieval” in the order, it was an order to torture the detainee – all secret service employees knew that. Beginning in March 2011, the number of these orders increased. The witness said he repeatedly saw torture orders from Brach 251 signed by Anwar R. In addition, the secret service departments sent the administration “death registers,” which listed the deceased prisoners. They received lists with dozens of daily. As a rule, the cause of death was omitted.

The man convincingly described his own fear. Anwar R had questioned him after he refused to participate in suppressing demonstrations. Later, he was arrested on several occasions for brief periods and also tortured. During the revolutionary years, the witness said “everything inside us was broken.” To this day, he remains intensely fearful of the Syrian regime, even in Germany.

While testifying, the witness repeatedly warned that his appearance in court could have dire consequences for his family in Syria. His family had already been threatened by regime loyalists, and told to prevent him from testifying in Koblenz. Many of his friends have felt “the regime’s revenge.” The witness also expressed concern for his own safety. The presiding judge acknowledged the difficult situation, but saw no way around his obligation to testify. She repeatedly reminded him to give truthful and complete testimony.

On the morning of 3 December, day 50 of the trial, the COVID-19 pandemic caught up to the court. A joint plaintiff’s planned hearing could not take place because a judge had to go into quarantine.

On day 46 of the Syria trial at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, a witness testified who had been imprisoned twice in the al-Khatib Branch. At the beginning of his testimony, his lawyer petitioned for him to remain anonymous and testify with his face partially covered. She said the witness feared for his family who was still in Syria. The court granted the petition, as his testimony could potentially endanger his family.

The witness told the court he was first arrested in March 2011 near Damascus because he participated in a demonstration against the Assad government. Guards brutally hit him, then brought him to al-Khatib, where he was received with a notorious “welcome party” customary in Syrian intelligence prisons: he was repeatedly hit in the face with a wooden club. This caused him to go temporarily blind in one eye, loose several teeth, and break several ribs, which resulted in difficulty breathing.

Then the witness was taken to a crowded, stuffy community cell. A paramedic examined him later, after which he was taken to a hospital. The guards accompanying him loudly insulted him; other patients spit at him. A physician gave him a prescription, but one the guards tore it up on the way back to the prison.

The next day, he was blindfolded and taken to an interrogation – but through a gap in the blindfold, he could see his surroundings. The officer who interrogated him accused him of being part of a terrorist organization. When the witness answered sarcastically, the officer repeatedly hit him on the face and rammed his knee in the witness’ stomach. The presiding judge asked the witness if he could identify the man who treated him like that. The witness pointed at Anwar R on the defendants’ bench. The main defendant listened to the accusation stone-faced; whispers could be heard among the public.

The witness reported that he had been interrogated and tortured three times during his imprisonment – the third time, he admitted to having participated in the demonstration. He was forced to sign a document saying he would not participate in future protests. Around a week after his arrest, he was let go.

A year later, in April 2012, security forces arrested the witness and took him to al-Khatib a second time. He was again subjected to a “welcome party,” merciless interrogations and horrible hygienic conditions. The cell he stayed in day and night with around 350 other prisoners was filthy. The only supply of fresh air was through a gap under the door. His fellow prisoners’ wounds were infected almost immediately, some festered and others teemed with maggots. The witness clearly remembered an injured man who died in the cell after weeks of agony. The other detainees had repeatedly asked the guards to provide the man with medical care – in vain. Instead, they were forced to place the man next to the filthy toilet and let him die there.

The witness described how fellow detainees had lost their minds under these conditions: being forced to stand for days on end, injured, tortured, deprived of sleep. After several weeks, the witness was beaten again by intelligence staff, then locked in a dark room. A couple of days later, they interrogated him again in al-Khatib. He was then taken to other detention facilities.

It was especially distressing to those in the courtroom to hear the witness describe the acute throughts of suicide he developed during his imprisonment. He recounted that he has recovered physically, but still suffers from sleeping disorders and traumatic memories. It was important for the trial that he was able to identify Anwar R in a series of eight pictures shown to him during a previous interview by the German Federal Criminal Police.

The next day, the defense lawyers questioned the witness about his testimony in France. They said on one of several occasions, he was shown photos. Could he now clarify that he recognized Anwar R in one of those pictures? The witness was uncertain, but earlier, the public prosecutors stated that Anwar R’s photos were only given to the French police after they interviewed this witness.

The lawyers for the joint plaintiffs then asked several questions about the witness’ first detention in al-Khatib. He was asked to give details on his first interrogation there, in order to compare them with Anwar R’s testimony.

Day 45 of the al-Khatib trial focused on the testimony of a survivor and joint plaintiff. The woman worked as a math teacher in Syria, and was imprisoned by the regime five times starting in 2011. The court concentrated mainly on her first two detentions. Supported by her counsel, ECCHR partner lawyer Patrick Kroker, she testified thoroughly and calmly.

The witness was first arrested in Damascus in November 2011. She and other demonstrators saw an intelligence service officer beat a young adult, and wanted to help him. Officers took her to a police station, where she and the six other detainees were forced to lie on the ground and beaten. She was then transferred to a criminal security department, a judge released her three days later.

The second arrest took place in February 2012. The witness was in her apartment sorting medicines that were to be taken to Homs, when about 20 secret service agents broke into her home. The witness, her two sisters and brother were arrested and taken to the al-Khatib Branch where she was interrogated for three days. Two people questioned her about the medicines and her alleged membership in a political movement. On the third day, she was transferred to General Intelligence Service Branch 285 where she spent another 21 days.

The witness vividly detailed how she constantly heard young men’s screams and saw their emaciated bodies as they walked through the hallways in both prisons. In Branch 285, she also became an eyewitness to “welcome parties,” where prison guards would beat and kick new inmates, and knock their heads against the wall. She did not see any corpses in the cells or hallways. Once, she saw through her cell window how four employees carried away a dead body wrapped in a blanket – it bore obvious traces of torture and was emaciated. Another time, she saw armed prison workers gather. Later she learned that a large demonstration had taken place that day. She therefore assumed that these employees had snuffed out the demonstration.

The witness testified that she was not tortured, but that on the way to and from interrogations and toilet visits, guards repeatedly beat her with clubs and bare hands. Al-Khatib’s hygienic and sanitary conditions were poor. She was once given a sedative upon request, but was refused sanitary pads for menstruation.

Many prisoners told her about sexual violence in the prisons. Upon arrival in Branch 251, she was searched by a Red Crescent nurse. When she had undressed for the search, a prison employee tried to enter the room. The nurse pushed him back, saying that the witness “was on her period,” but he still saw her naked. One of the guards in Branch 251 who led her to interrogations harassed her and touched her breasts several times.
Insults, also with sexual connotations, were a daily occurrence. The witness noted that she was never addressed by name during her imprisonment, only by derogatory terms such as “prostitute.” She reported threats of rape, also to her sisters and brother. When asked by the presiding judge, the witness confirmed that she had taken these threats seriously and feared bad things would happen to her or her family members.

Following her testimony, ECCHR partner lawyers and joint plaintiff representatives Kroker and Sebastian Scharmer read a motion on behalf of eight joint plaintiffs demanding that sexual violence not be treated as individual cases under the German Criminal Code, as has been the case so far. Rather, sexual violence should be seen as one of the crimes against humanity Anwar R is accused of. Rape and other forms of sexual violence are part of the large-scale and systematic attack on the Syrian civilian population, used specifically to suppress it. The attorneys argued that this has been made evident in the trial, referring to past hearings, as well as in dozens of passages in the (non-public) trial case file. They supported their argument with international organization reports, and requested that these be read into evidence.

The joint plaintiff lawyers demanded that the indictment be updated, and Anwar R be tried for sexual violence, which they described as “one of the gravest and cruelest aspects of the regime’s crimes against humanity, which is deliberately designed to silence victims.” They concluded by saying that their clients are united by “the hope that the court will listen to those who take the difficult path of breaking their silence.” When the motion was heard, Anwar R buried his face in his hands several times. His defense lawyers and the other parties to the trial reserved the right to comment on the motion.

Measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are becoming stricter in Koblenz, too. Visitors must now fill out a registration form and present it upon entering the building. This resulted in a long line in front of the courthouse when Chris Engels, lead investigator of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, testified on days 43 and 44.

Everyone interested in addressing the crimes in Syria knows CIJA, a nonprofit organization that collects evidence to support criminal investigations. International criminal law experts have long discussed whether this evidence holds up in court. On day 43 of the trial, CIJA’s evidence was shared with the public in detail for the first time, one reason many eagerly awaited Engel’s testimony. According to CIJA, since 2012, it has obtained approximately 800,000 pages of original documents from the Syrian military and secret services, and smuggled them out of the country. As director of investigations, Engels is responsible for CIJA’s cooperation with national law enforcement agencies. He worked in this capacity with the German Federal Criminal Police in the al-Khatib trial.

Engels began by describing how his organization works, especially with regard to securing documents. He then spoke about his findings: the central structures and bodies responsible for cracking down on the demonstrations and riots in 2011 and 2012. He supported his testimony with documents CIJA collected from the Syrian secret services. For example, instructions distributed to the intelligence and police services on 5 August 2011. Among other things, they listed groups of people the security forces should target: those who financed or called for demonstrations, members of opposition groups, and even people who had contact abroad. The rhetoric in the documents from the highest level of government gradually became harsher. It became increasingly clear that the demonstrations should be dealt with by force. With internal reports from various Syrian institutions, the witness clearly showed how these instructions found their way from the highest levels of government to the executive branches. Transcripts of prisoner interrogations, for example, then moved up the reporting chain, leading to more people being added to the wanted list.

Additional evidence confirms the authenticity of CIJA’s documents. The organization conducted 16 interviews with witnesses also named in the documents. The documents furthermore describe the circumstances of the deaths of four people who have been identified in the Caesar photos.
While the other parties to the trial attentively followed the presentation, the two defendants were primarily interested in the original Arabic documents. Some of the documents Engels presented had already been made public in a US trial.

On another slide, Engels showed how prisoners were transported across the country – many were taken to Damascus from different regions of Syria; some were transferred to other cities several times. This mainly happened when the secret services thought a detainee was important or valuable in terms of gaining knowledge. Engels explained that the abuse and torture methods witnesses described to CIJA were similar throughout Syria, a sign of their systematic nature. He concluded: this fulfills the definition of crimes against humanity. The regime responded to the uprisings with systematic and widespread torture, abuse and imprisonment.

After the lunch break, Engels talked about General Secret Service Branches 251 and 285. Branch 285 is a central, technical division. Branch 251 (al-Khatib) is responsible for Damascus and the surrounding rural areas. The judges repeatedly asked the witness if he knew which branch was responsible for which prisoners. Engels responded that this remained unclear to him. He explained that Branch 251’s Subdivision 40 was particularly notorious and acted independently. It was headed by Hafez Makhlouf, relative of the Assad family. A guard in al-Khatib told the witness that multiple prisoners had died in the prison from torture and the conditions there.

CIJA also found evidence that after leaving Branch 251 in summer 2012, the main defendant Anwar R continued to head the investigative unit of the General Intelligence Agency’s Central Investigation Division (Branch 285) for several months. Engels substantiated this with documents that showed the receipt of prisoner interrogation transcripts, as well as information from and about prisoners. In addition, the nonprofit organization had three internal investigation reports that identified Anwar R as the head of the Central Investigation Committee. One report mentioned a witness who CIJA later interviewed. Content-wise, the report was identical to the witness’s description of the circumstances of detainees’ arrests, questioning and charges. But it was missing the torture and abuse the witness mentioned to CIJA. For those watching, this raised the question of why these crimes are not included in Anwar R’s indictment.

The next day, the senate and other parties to the trial questioned the witness. Their main focus was on CIJA’s development, working methods and funding. Engels explained what information the organization shared with the German federal prosecutor regarding the current proceedings. In addition, the defendants’ defense counsel wanted to know what CIJA knew about possible consequences for Syrian secret services employees if they refused to obey orders. Engels answered that in these cases, the regime sends very clear messages. Anyone who did not correctly carry out instructions to suppress the oppositional protests was to be reported by other colleagues. In this way, anyone who refused to obey orders may have become a target themselves.

After the witness was dismissed, the court made an important organizational announcement. The judges are planning to separate the trial against Eyad A on 17 February 2021, and to hear closing statements in his case. On 24 February, the judges want to announce the verdict. This is only a preliminary plan, because in such a major trial – especially in times of COVID – unexpected things could happen that affect the timeline. In addition, starting in January 2021, the trial will no longer be held in the Koblenz Regional Court’s large hearing room, but will be moved to a room in the Higher Regional Court nearby. The new courtroom is currently rebuilt in order to be able to maintain physical distancing rules. This also means that there will be fewer seats available for the public. For particularly important days, such as when the verdict is announced, the trial may return to the Regional Court room 128.

On day 41 of the al-Khatib trial, the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz dealt with the Caesar photos – as it did the previous week. Professor Markus Rothschild from Universität zu Köln was invited to testify about his forensic analysis. Beginning in 2017, the expert and his colleague examined each of the 26,938 photographs of people killed in Syrian prisons. They just completed this multi-year project a few weeks ago.

Rothschild came to court with a detailed presentation. He meticulously described the injuries he found the people in the Caesar photos had suffered, and the extent to which his findings confirmed previous witness testimonies. For each type of abuse and injury, the expert showed several pictures that demonstrated the cruelty of the crimes. Although he presented his findings soberly, the courtroom was tensely silent. The mood darkened with each photograph Rothschild showed. Toward the end, many watching the trial averted their eyes – the brutal images on the slides were too disturbing.

First, the expert concentrated on the visual analysis of the photos he conducted on behalf of the German Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office. Rothschild presented a clearly recognizable pattern of injuries. He and his colleague were often even convinced that they had already seen a picture, the resemblance was so striking.

The forensic scientist presented statistics from his findings. In 88.6 percent of the cases, he could state with certainty that the person photographed was dead. According to his assessment, the others were probably also dead, but did not show clear signs like postmortem rigidity, skin changes or decay, as they were partially clothed or heavily soiled. Many were injured before death: in most cases by blunt force. Numerous photos showed people so disfigured he had to investigate the respective injuries – even after more than 40 years’ experience in the field. He found that many bodies showed sharp force injuries, some had marks from strangulation, and about half were completely naked. According to the expert, it was possible  that their underwear was pulled down especially for the photographs, but he had no explanation as to why this was done.

Second, Rothschild compared previous witness testimony with his forensic findings, particularly regarding the al-Khatib Branch. His conclusion: survivors’ descriptions were largely consistent with his forensic analysis. He testified that abuse in Syrian prisons would accordingly range from beatings to burns and pulling nails. Many victims had been forced to stand for a long time, which he could tell from swelling in their legs. In the end, he said that in many cases, he believed it was very likely the people in the photographs were executed or left to die – which also reflects survivors’ testimony.

Third, he explained the extent to which the Caesar photos allow conclusions to be drawn about hygiene and living conditions in Syrian prisons, especially al-Khatib. For example, many witnesses stated in a German Federal Criminal Police status report that cells were often completely overcrowded. Rothschild was able to confirm that statements about parasite infestations were true, indicating a lack of hygiene in the prisons. The photos do not show a consistent picture of the food and medical provisions in the prisons, but do corroborate the witness statements: evidently, some people received enough food and medical care, while others were malnourished with wounds only covered by dirty pieces of cloth.

In summary, the expert noted that the Caesar files suggested systematic abuse and neglect in Syrian prisons. This was a central theme in his findings. He also emphasized that the photos corroborated the overwhelming majority of the survivors’ statements.

On the following day of the trial, the translation of a resume was discussed. Subsequently, a German Federal Intelligence Service statement was read that dealt with the structure of the Syrian secret service.

Days 39 and 40 of the al-Khatib trial were also scheduled to deal with Caesar, the defected Syrian military police photographer, and his photographs that were smuggled abroad. On day 39, the court read a 2014 report by the London law firm Carter-Ruck that assesses the credibility of certain evidence of the torture and execution of people detained by the current Assad regime. 

For its report on behalf of the Qatari government, the law firm assembled a team of international law experts with experience prosecuting war crimes. In order to evaluate Caesar’s credibility and photographs, they interviewed him several times in January 2014. He told them that he had worked as a photographer for the Syrian military police for 13 years. When the civil war began in 2011, his job changed from photographing crime scenes and accidents to photographing killed prisoners. Detainees’ corpses were taken to the Mezzeh and Tishreen Military Hospitals, among others. Caesar was sent there with a physician and a member of the judiciary to photograph the bodies. The murdered detainees were given a reference number for the body, and one that referred to the secret service department responsible for their detention and death. In the military hospital, they were given a third number to prove that the death had occurred at the hospital. Out of deep concern about what was happening, Caesar sent copies of the photos on a USB stick to his trusted contact “Sami.” Of the more than 50,000 photos showing more than 11,000 victims, a forensic team examined a total of 5500 images of an estimated 1300 corpses. According to computer specialists, none of the pictures had been digitally altered or manipulated. After questioning Caesar and examining the photos, the team of experts concluded that there is clear evidence that the Syrian government has systematically tortured and killed detainees.

On day 40 of the trial, a chief German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) commissioner was asked to testify about the Caesar photos and the BKA’s interview of Sami.

For his testimony, the chief police commissioner compiled all the information the BKA has gathered in its Caesar file in recent years. In addition to examining and sorting the images from Sami, this included forensic medical analysis by the Universität Köln, which will be introduced into the proceedings next week. It also included Sami’s November 2017 witness statement, as well as interviews with other witnesses who recognized people in the Caesar photos. Also included is a German Aerospace Center satellite image analysis of the Mezzeh Military Hospital where some bodies are said to have been stored out in the open, as well as the Carter-Ruck report, which was read in court the previous day. In addition, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability forwarded Syrian secret service internal documents concerning torture prison deaths to the BKA, as well as death certificates the Syrian government handed out to relatives of the deceased. According to the chief police commissioner, all of the evidence confirms the photos’ authenticity, painting a complete picture of the Caesar photos and the Syrian government’s actions. The commissioner said that at no time during his many years of involvement with the Caesar case did he have any indication that the pictures or any aspect of their origin were falsified. Sami’s witness statements at the time were precise, calm and very credible.

From the BKA’s November 2017 interview of Sami in Germany, the chief commissioner was able to testify that Caesar photographed between 10 to 20 corpses per day at the beginning of the revolution. Later, he photographed over 50 corpses a day, which looked like they had been tortured, bound and strangled. Many were starved to death. Almost all of the victims were men between 20 and 40 years old. Sami also confirmed Caesar’s statement about the Syrian military police’s meticulous process of documenting the dead. On the one hand, the photographs allowed death certificates to be issued without families seeing the corpses of those who had been tortured to death. On the other hand, the photos could have served as evidence within the regime that an execution order was carried out. Relatives were told that their loved ones died from cardiac arrest or respiratory problems.

Sami also confirmed that Caesar wanted to desert in May 2011 because of what he saw every day and that Sami had convinced him not to. Rather, Caesar was to collect evidence so that the murderers could be prosecuted. To this end, Sami and Caesar met almost daily at Sami’s apartment to save and organize the photos Caesar brought on Sami’s computer. Sami labeled the files with the branch number in which the deceased had been imprisoned, their prisoner number and date the photo was taken. Sami also assigned the photos to the different security service branches. He told the police that there were ultimately four different versions of the files. Of these, a group supporting Caesar uploaded one compressed file to Google Drive and sent it to Liechtenstein. The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office received an uncompressed Google Drive file in 2013. Sami saved a compressed file on a hard drive; another uncompressed version was saved on a hard drive in a secret location in Syria.

The chief police commissioner told the court that the BKA asked Liechtenstein for judicial assistance in November 2015. The Caesar files there were then handed over to the BKA and the Universität Köln’s forensic medicine department for technical protection and processing. The files from Liechtenstein comprised around 98,000 files, of which almost 55,000 had the same content. The court wanted to know the extent to which the compressed files from Liechtenstein differed from the uncompressed files that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office received. The witness explained that the uncompressed files had no real added value since each copying process, especially the uploading process, changes the files’ metadata.

After evaluating the Caesar photos, interviewing Sami and other witnesses, and reviewing additional documents that the BKA received from other informants and CIJA, the BKA was able to finally confirm that all of the photographs in the Caesar files were taken between May 2011 and August 2013 on behalf of the Syrian Military Police’s Office of the Prosecutor General.

At the end of the day, the court showed a selection of photos from the Caesar files. With these disturbing images in their heads, those watching the trial finally stepped outside into the rain.

After a two-week break, the trial continued on day 38 with testimony from the journalist Garance Le Caisne. Her book Codename Caesar was published in March 2016. In it, she tells the story of a former Syrian military photographer, referred to as Caesar, who smuggled more than 50,000 photographs of Assad regime torture victims out of the country.

Le Caisne was asked to testify about her contact with Caesar and his photos. In a clear, firm voice, she first spoke about her career as a freelance journalist and decades working in the Middle East. In 2011, she reported on the wave of protest there – the so-called Arab Spring – and traveled regularly to Tunisia, Libya and Syria. In spring 2014, she was commissioned by the French weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche to attend an international press conference in Qatar at which the Caesar files were presented to the public. She set out to find and interview Caesar. Many journalists wanted to meet him; none succeeded.

To attract Caesar’s attention and show him her work, she had three of her articles translated into Arabic. According to Le Caisne, one of her contacts was so moved by her articles that he put her in touch with Caesar’s close confidante, Sami. Le Caisne assured Sami that she did not want to write a book about Caesar, but about the atrocities committed in Syrian intelligence service prisons. After meeting with Sami many times, Le Caisne heard Caesar’s voice for the first time in March 2015 during a Skype call. A short time later, their first meeting took place. More followed.

The court wanted to know how Caesar took the photos, and about his role in taking them. As a military photographer, his main job was to photograph incidents, such as accidents, in which soldiers were involved. But after the civil war broke out in 2011, Caesar’s main task was to photograph dead insurgents in the Mezzeh Civil Hospital 601 and the Tishreen Military Hospital 607. Caesar told Le Caisne that at the beginning of the revolution, the corpses were named. Later, they were numbered: one for each prisoner, one for the corresponding department of the four intelligence services – for example 215, 248 and 227 – and one documenting the cause of death – cardiac arrest. However, the corpses – including children and the elderly – bore signs of severe violence and torture, which could hardly be described. She also received a photograph of a form from Caesar. The photographer had to fill out these forms and attach them to the photos of the dead. They assisted forensic examiners’ archival work. Le Caisne gave the photo of the form to the presiding judge. The form and its translation raised questions from the parties to the trial about its content, authenticity and blackened text.

Le Caisne was also asked how Caesar reacted to his job of photographing tortured civilians. The witness said that at first, he could not believe what he was seeing every day. Caesar ultimately wanted to desert the regime because of the drastically increasing numbers of the dead. A childhood friend whom he shared this wish with in spring 2011, however, urged him to continue working to gather evidence of the Assad government’s crimes.

Caesar therefore remained in his job for another year and a half. He copied 53,200 photographs, which he smuggled out of his office on a USB stick, hidden in his belt or the heel of a shoe, and then handed them over to his friend. The latter copied and backed up the files, which later found their way to the Public Prosecutors’ Offices in France, Germany and Lichtenstein, the FBI and others through a group of supporters. In summer 2013, Caesar went into hiding and left Syria with the help of opposition members. A third person smuggled an external hard drive with the photos out of Syria. In Turkey, Caesar’s friend then categorized and archived the photos with the support of a human rights organization. The friend told Le Caisne that he sent the files to the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office in the same way he received them. According to Le Caisne, the files were high resolution images.

After the lunch break, the court examined selected “Caesar photos.” Le Caisne confirmed that the photos shown resembled those she had seen. Asked about their authenticity, Le Caisne said that relatives of missing detainees identified about 700 of the bodies after many of the photos were published by the Turkish human rights organization. What did Caesar hope to achieve by publishing the photos? Le Caisne suspected that he hoped that it would put an end to the crimes; a hope that has not yet been fulfilled.

Journalist Christoph Reuter was called as a witness on day 37 of the al-Khatib trial. The Spiegel Middle East correspondent is also known for his books on life during the Iraq War and the Islamic State. Due to his extensive knowledge of Syria, the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz decided to call Reuter as an expert witness. His questioning focused on two main topics: the development of the situation in Syria in 2011 and 2012, and his meeting with the main defendant Anwar R.

The witness studied in Syria in the 1990s. After several shorter stays there, he went to Syria for the German news magazine Spiegel in 2011. Initially, his research mainly focused on understanding visions of the opposition and the emerging lines of conflict.

“When did the Syrian regime start to direct fire at civilians in response to demonstrations?” the court asked. The regime shot at demonstrators since February/March 2011, but denied this time and again. People were also arrested during demonstrations, said Reuter. They were beaten up in prison, but then “released” after a short time – with the exception of a situation in April or May 2011 in Homs, where about 200 people disappeared without a trace.

The witness described the demonstrations as “flashmobs.” People walked together onto the streets, held up signs, filmed this for a few minutes, and disappeared. In order to react to possible regime fire, demonstrators stood with the fastest runners in the middle of the street and older people on the edge. Reuter recognized patterns in the sequence of demonstrations: Fridays – demonstrations resulting in deaths and injuries; Saturdays – funeral processions and more attacks by the regime; Sundays to Thursdays – silence. When questioned by the defense counsel for the second defendant, Eyad A, the expert confirmed that it was the secret services that fired at demonstrators.

The secret services’ function changed in spring 2011, the witness explained. Before that, they competed internally. Thereafter, they increasingly worked together. Even though they had always collected more than just information – meaning they also intervened militarily – this was now in the foreground. The secret services captured and tortured considerably more people. Mass murders and sending corpses to military hospitals were also new. Reuter first heard about this in April 2012 with regard to the military hospital in Homs. Only once a man who was searching for his brother’s body told Reuter about the military hospitals in Tishreen and Harasta.

Reuter’s meeting with Anwar R took place in Jordan shortly after the defendant deserted in 2012. The reporter wanted to learn about the regime’s inner workings – mostly, he wanted to research the regime’s “staging of terror” to present itself as a “lesser evil” compared to IS and other groups. Ali Mamluk, head of the General Intelligence Directorate at the time, was a specialist in this.

Why does the witness think the accused deserted? Since 2011, “professional investigative work” was no longer possible, since torture was used even though people did not have information to share. The system’s “useless torture” had bothered the accused, said Reuter. What could Reuter say about al-Khatib? He did not talk about deceased detainees with Anwar R. Reuter knew, however, that people were afraid of being taken to the al-Khatib Branch. In general, the reporter assumed that the Military Intelligence and Air Force Intelligence Services treated detainees most brutally.

All in all, Reuter vividly described the situation in Syria in 2011 and 2012. Affected witnesses’ previous testimony was put in context again – this time, through a journalist’s eyes.

Day 35 and 36 of the Syria trial revolved around the fate of Malek (name changed) who might have died in the al-Khatib Branch. His brother was the witness summoned on day 35. What is certain is that Malek, a doctor, disappeared in al-Khatib and that his family to this day does not know what happened to him. The testimony on both days of the trial mainly concerned the search for Malek, or his body. Once again, it became clear: this trial and the Syrian state apparatus’ alleged crimes against humanity are about the fates of thousands of individuals and countless traumatized families.

The witness, also a joint plaintiff in the trial, gave a second-hand account of his brother’s disappearance. He himself had been imprisoned at the time and recounted what another brother told him. He suggested that this second brother should also be called as a witness.

On day 35, the witness first testified briefly on his own imprisonment in May 2012 with the Air Force Intelligence Service, and in July 2012 with the Military Intelligence Service. His second imprisonment coincided with Malek’s disappearance.

The witness presented evidence that supports that Malek did indeed die. Prison guards tried to give Malek’s personal belongings to the second brother, as well as a death certificate that said Malek died of kidney failure or a heart attack – although all Syrians know this cause of death is listed when someone dies from torture. The witness also reported that main defendant Anwar R had instructed the other brother not to ask any questions about Malek, and told him to go to the military hospital in Harasta to collect his corpse. In addition, a deserter smuggled out a list of names of deceased prisoners from Branch 251 and sent a photograph of it to the witness via WhatsApp. Malek’s name was number 71 on the list. A fellow inmate released from Branch 251 later told the witness in detail that Malek had been severely tortured, and had been transferred to a place where there were mass graves.

On day 36, a new witness was called to the bench. He gave a more concrete account of what had happened, as he had looked for Malek himself. He said that Malek was arrested because he treated injured opposition members. The witness had been looking for Malek together with the other brother. With the support of a family friend who was in the secret service and others connected to the regime, they succeeded in visiting Branch 251 and meeting Anwar R. For this, the witness paid about 400,000 Syrian lira (about 3,800 euros at the time.) He did not know how much the other brother paid beyond that.

The witness and the other brother visited the al-Khatib Branch twice. During their first visit at the end of July 2012, prison guards wanted to give them Malek’s personal belongings. However, the brother did not take them – he did not want to give up his search for Malek.

A few days later, the witness had gone to al-Khatib a second time and met with Anwar R personally. He had waited in front of Anwar R’s office on a wooden bench in a hallway that led to several rooms. Waiting had been psychological torture – “a warning,” the witness suspected. In the other rooms, he had seen prisoners kneeling, blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. They had been wet, as if doused with water. He had heard loud screams and beatings.

He had been only in Anwar R’s office briefly. The latter wanted the witness to leave quickly, saying, “Take his body – or any corpse – and disappear!” Anwar R then posed conditions, such as a fourth brother having to return from Saudi Arabia. Thereafter, the witness and Malek’s other brother went to the Tishreen and Harasta military hospital mortuaries. There they saw countless naked corpses with numbers on their chests or foreheads. Some looked as if they had been dead for a long time, others for not very long. Some showed signs of torture, others had bullet wounds. The brother was supposed to “pick out” a corpse, but Malek was not there.

The witness also reported that sometime later, he was approached by a friend whose neighbor in Harasta had information about Malek. When they met, the neighbor showed “signs of torture and starvation.” He reported that Malek had been tortured so badly that he hallucinated. With this, the witness ended his testimony and was excused.

At the end of the day, the witness from day 35 took the stand again. On behalf of his mother and himself, he directly addressed the accused, asking what happened to his brother. A defense lawyer later read a statement from the defendant, which said that Anwar R had had no contact with Malek’s brother or the witness from day 36. They had not visited him; he did not know them.

The trial ended with the reading of extracts of a Human Rights Watch report.

Those involved in the al-Khatib trial have developed a kind of routine. Members of the public watching the trial greet each other warmly and discuss what happened in recent days of the trial in a mixture of German, English and Arabic.

On trial day 34, a witness has been summoned to the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz to speak as a survivor about her imprisonment in the al-Khatib Branch and her personal meetings with defendant Anwar R. Her testimony was striking. Beginning in 2011, the witness was imprisoned in al-Khatib twice - also while Anwar R headed its investigation department. Both times, she was arrested at a peaceful demonstration, and transported with other demonstrators for a few hours to Branch 40 - where they were brutally beaten and sometimes subjected to sexual violence - before being taken to al-Khatib later the same day.

After a physical examination in the al-Khatib Branch, she was taken to a mounfarideh – a cell about the size of the table she was testifying from and so high that she could just stand. “Like a grave,” the witness said. The cell had no daylight.

The screams of those being tortured in the al-Khatib Branch were terrible. You could hear them non-stop. In the morning, they were mixed with Fairuz's singing, one of the most famous Arab singers whose voice rang through the detention center. The witness was lucky – she was only rarely tortured. She described how the electric shocks she was subjected to felt: the device used was only about the size of a laser pointer, but when held against the neck, made the whole body twitch. In this state, she could no longer say how many individual shocks she had been given.

When the prosecutor asked about hygine in the prison, the witness laughed sarcastically. There was no hygiene, she said. There were insects everywhere. Walking to the toilet and back, which she was only allowed to do once a day, took about three minutes. The guards used the route “to put her muscles to the test,” and hit her bottom. When she asked for feminine hygiene products after getting her period, the guards made fun of her. She used her socks.

Later, the witness spoke in detail about the sexual violence in al-Khatib. Among other things, she described how she was examined naked, and how a fellow prisoner’s hijab was torn off. In addition, women were socially isolated after their imprisonment, especially if they had been raped. In this context, she also referred to the film Syrie - Le Cri Etouffé, which she recommended to the defense attorney, who asked for additional information for the first time in the trial.

Then the witness spoke of the main defendant, because she knew Anwar R personally. At the presiding judge’s request, she turned to Anwar R in the courtroom and reconfirmed this. The witness met him twice. The first time, she was taken to him in the al-Khatib Branch with her clothes torn by beatings. At his insistence, her blindfold was removed: she saw a picture of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad on the wall. Anwar R questioned her about herself, her family, and the political events in Syria. He was friendly to her, offered her coffee and allowed her to smoke.

The next day, she was transferred to the secret service district of Kafr Sousa and then released. She suspected that this was probably due to UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan’s recent visit to Syria. As a newspaper article quoted later in the trial showed, he demanded political prisoners be released, among other things.

The witness met Anwar R a second time with a friend at a café in Jordan. It was a strange situation to drink coffee with someone who had allowed prisoners to be tortured. It was even stranger that he asked her how he and his family could travel safely from Damascus to Ghouta – he was the one who had worked for the security service. The meeting was friendly. As a side note, he explicitly mentioned that he had turned away from the regime. However, he did not show remorse or apologize to her.

The public prosecutor dug deeper into these personal meetings with Anwar R since the witness’ testimony deviated substantially from the defendant’s statement. Is it correct, as Anwar R stated, that the witness had been taken to his office an hour after she was arrested? No, the witness said. Did she work for the BBC? No, she repeated. Is she from Maaraba? No. Is she Christian? No. Anwar R quietly shook his head. The prosecutor did not ask further questions, nor did the defense.

At the end of the day, the witness was dismissed. Her remarks were so concise that the parties to the trial had no further questions, and the court canceled the next day of the hearing, which was scheduled for further questioning.

Finally, the presiding judge read out the court’s rejection of an earlier request by the defense to repeat trial days one to 23, due to accredited journalists’ lack of access to an Arabic language translation. The court justified its decision, saying that this was not a violation of the principle of transparency. Instead, the German Federal Constitutional Court’s decision was based on freedom of the press and the press’ right to equal treatment, not on the criminal proceedings per se.

Those interested in Syria, and especially the crimes of Bashar al-Assad’s government, know the witness who was at the center of the al-Khatib trial on day 32 and 33. Mazen Darwish is a journalist and Syrian human rights lawyer, and founded the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) in 2004. He has been an important Syrian partner for ECCHR since 2016.

Darwish was imprisoned several times in Syria and was severely tortured. At the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, however, it was less about his personal experience than his comprehensive expertise on structures and developments in Syria – also before the peaceful protests against Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Based on his own experience and the work of his organization, Darwish outlined political and social events beginning in 1958 that led to the dictatorial governments of Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad.

According to Darwish, the Assads’ goal is to completely control Syrian society. Children and students are indoctrinated through youth organizations and curricula. Trade unions and professional associations were broken up, sometimes bloodily, and freedom of the press suppressed. Active civil society was persecuted. There was also no “real” parliament in Syria. These are totalitarian regimes’ usual methods, the witness concluded. Power was “inherited” in Syria, which is why the country is more a “family business” than a state. An important instrument of repression was the security apparatus, which had a completely free hand and did not have to fear prosecution.

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, the military, police and secret services have relied on unchecked violence and arbitrariness. Darwish testified that right at the beginning of the protests, on 15 March 2011, many peaceful demonstrators were arrested in Damascus, as well as the next day when people demonstrated for the release of those arrested. At the end of March 2011, President Assad publically and unequivocally threatened the peaceful demonstrators, saying, “If you want an open war, then so be it.” Torture has always existed in Syria, the human rights lawyer testified, but since 2011 the number of “disappeared,” imprisoned and tortured people has increased enormously. Moreover, from then on, the Assad government used torture not mainly to force confessions, but for retaliation and deterrence.

Asked by the court, the witness also reported on Branch 251: al-Khatib. To support his testimony, Darwish submitted numerous documents to the court, including a list of the names and ranks of 93 employees of Branch 251, the testimony of a witness from Harasta military hospital about corpses from al-Khatib, a list of deaths from Branch 251 with the numbers of refrigerated trucks and bodies, and 103 photographs of dead detainees from that branch.

The documents were compiled and translated by Darwish’s organization SCM. Darwish collected some of the documents himself, which is evident from his signature. After some discussion between the parties, the court admitted the documents, which will be provided to the parties to the trial in the coming weeks and then introduced to the trial – because the documents could be of great importance to the proceedings.  

Darwish testified that he never met the main defendant Anwar R. He had heard, however, that Anwar R had been the head of the al-Khatib interrogation department. Like other witnesses, Darwish emphasized that it is impossible that in his position, Anwar R did not know about the torture. Anyone who volunteers to work for one of the Syrian secret services declares at the outset that they are prepared to carry out all tasks in the system. Only those who were one hundred percent loyal to the regime would be accepted.

When asked by ECCHR partner lawyer and counsel for the joint plaintiffs Sebastian Scharmer whether the secret services used sexual and gender-based violence, the witness stated that there had been repeated sexual assaults against men and women. He had experienced this himself. When he and his wife, a long-time human rights activist, were imprisoned, a secret service agent had asked him if she were raped, would he have the right to divorce her without having to repay her dowry. As a lawyer, he should know. It was clear to him that the secret service officer was not interested in the answer, but was sending him an unmistakable signal.

On day 33, another witness was heard following Darwish’s testimony. The man appeared wearing a face mask out of fear for his brother in Syria, he said. But the court insisted that the witness take off the mask.

The witness stated that he was friends with the brother of Anwar R’s wife. He had met the main defendant at a funeral service in 2005. Later he visited him in his office in Damascus and had coffee with him. The witness said he knew Anwar R was an intelligence officer. That is why he approached him in 2012 when the military intelligence service imprisoned his cousin. Anwar R had told him his cousin’s situation was precarious. He also told him about a severely abused person. “With something like this, the heart bleeds,” Anwar R had said. The witness admitted, however, that he did not have the impression that the secret service work incriminated Anwar R in principle. A few years later, in Germany, the witness said he had spoken with the accused on the phone several times. They did not talk about their respective attitudes toward the Syrian government. He learned that Anwar R had turned his back on the regime on television in late 2012. Overall, this testimony neither exonerated the defendant nor added much information to the trial.

On day 30 and 31 of the al-Khatib trial, as on day 22 and 23 (see trial reports), the Koblenz Higher Regional Court summoned a witness whose identity was to remain secret. The witness therefore kept his face covered throughout his testimony. The defense objected, which the presiding judge overruled: the potential danger to the witness’ relatives in Syria justified him not revealing his identity.

Also, for the first time, an accredited Syrian journalist who attended the trial was granted access to the Arabic interpretation. In so doing, the court complied with an 18 August preliminary injunction by the German Constitutional Court (see trial report day 24).

The witness, referred to as “Z 30/07/19,” reported in detail about his work in cemeteries in the province of Damascus. He testified that at the end of 2011, two intelligence officers showed up and ordered him and several of his colleagues to help them transport and bury corpses. The officers provided the witness with a van – without license plates but with pictures of President Bashar al-Assad. Several times a week for several years, he drove his colleagues from the Tishreen, Mezzeh and Harasta military hospitals to al-Quteifa and Najha cemeteries, usually accompanied by intelligence officers and large refrigerated trucks. The trucks carried several hundred corpses per week.

At the cemeteries, the trucks stopped next to deeply dug trenches. The witness’ colleagues unloaded the corpses with their bare hands, often without protective equipment; some fell gravely ill. As soon as a section of the trench was full of bodies, an excavator covered it with dirt. The witness described how corpses kept being brought to the cemeteries, and how new trenches were constantly being dug.

The witness’ task was to drive the others, and to list information provided by the officers about the number and origin of the corpses. “The corpses came from many different detention centers of various secret services, including the General Intelligence Service’s al-Khatib prison and the Saydnaya military prison,” the witness told the court.

It became clear to everyone in the courtroom how the sight and smell of the corpses haunts the witnesses to this day. He testified that once he could not eat for days. At some point, he and his colleagues felt that they could not wash off the corpses’ smell, even by showering.

The witness reported important details. At Saydnaya prison, he saw corpses up close. He speculated that they had been executed. The bodies had not yet decomposed, and he saw signs of strangulation. The witness’ statements correspond, for example, with Amnesty International’s report “Human slaughterhouse: Mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya prison, Syria.”

The men he drove and the excavator drivers told the witness about corpses they saw in the hospitals. They spoke of corpses marked with numbers and symbols on their foreheads or chests. Some of the bodies’ hands were still tied behind their backs with handcuffs or zip ties. Others were bloody, and had bruises and removed toe and fingernails. Some of the corpses’ faces were unrecognizable from acid burns. Some experiences particularly affected the witness. Once a man who had supposedly been executed was still breathing – until an officer ordered an excavator driver to run over him. Another time, he discovered a woman holding her child in her arms among the corpses. He almost broke down when he saw this.

The thought and memory of the corpses is still extremely distressing to the witness. This was visible during his testimony. The trial took several recesses upon his request. On the afternoon of day 30 of the trial, he finally asked to be excused for the day.

The next day, the witness continued his testimony. Documents were projected on the wall, including sketches he made during police questioning of the lists he filled out with the names of detention centers the corpses came from, including al-Khatib. The presiding judge asked the witness to locate the hospitals and burial sites on satellite images. This was difficult for him because the maps mostly depicted desert and used Latin letters that he could not read.

Finally, the day ended with a discussion between the judge, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, and counsel for the joint plaintiffs and defense about the witness and his identity.

What will undoubtedly remain from these two days are the gruesome details about countless corpses. They reveal the extent of the crimes committed in Syrian torture prisons such as al-Khatib.

Two witnesses testified on day 29 of the trial: Federal Criminal Police (BKA) senior and chief commissioners spoke about their two arrests of the accused Eyad A.

The senior police commissioner testified first, recalling BKA’s arrest on 12 February 2019. Eyad A was arrested based on a warrant issued by the German Federal Court of Justice. The witness first explained why the arrest did not take place in Eyad A’s apartment. The BKA knew that the man had young children whom he lived with. Therefore, after receiving the arrest warrant, the BKA contacted the responsible immigration office to avoid his children witnessing their father’s arrest.

When the officers informed him about the arrest warrant, Eyad A was very surprised, according to the senior police commissioner. He could still remember the stunned expression on Eyad A’s face. On the trip to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, the defendant was informed about his rights. The commissioner testified that Eyad A repeatedly asserted that this all must be a big misunderstanding, and that he had been friendly, polite and cooperative.

The BKA officer had to pause briefly to find the right words: when Eyad A was transferred from the Federal Court of Justice to the Saarbrücken Penitentiary (JVA), he was visibly distraught. He constantly repeated that there must have been a misunderstanding and would soon return home to his family.

After a complaint was filed with the investigating judge at the Federal Supreme Court, the arrest warrant was revoked shortly therafter, and Eyad A was released from custody. This was because the defendant incriminated himself during questioning, and was only later informed about his rights as an accused. This was a procedural error, but should not have led to his arrest warrant being revoked. Therefore, Eyad A was taken back into custody a few weeks after his release.

The second witness reported on Eyad A’s second arrest, which took place on 24 June 2019. The chief commissioner said that the defendant had complained of health problems, putting into question whether he could be taken to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe that day. Therefore, he was first taken to a nearby hospital and seen by an emergency room physician. Since the arrest warrant was still valid, however, he was driven to the Federal Court of Justice after a brief stay in the hospital, and then taken back to the Saarbrücken prison.

The third item on day’s agenda, as on the previous day, was reading reports into evidence, such as the German translation of the UN report of the 31st Special Session, which documents the systematic violence in Syrian prisons.

The judges took turns reading detailed descriptions of how prisoners were arbitrarily arrested and sometimes tortured to death in government prisons. One survivor reported that another man had his eyes burned with a cigarette butt and his body pierced with a hot metal rod. The guards then let him die an agonizing death. In many cases, the corpses were destroyed. It became very quiet in the courtroom when the presiding judge read a prisoner’s description of the death of a fellow prisoner, saying, “He died, we closed his eyes, wrapped a military blanket around his body and read the Koran in our hearts.”

Lastly, a Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) report from 16 January 2012 was read into the record. It mainly dealt with the unrest in Syria and the reactions of Syria’s and international governments. The BAMF reported how protests spread during the Arab Spring, and the military was ordered to shoot peaceful demonstrators. Due to time constraints, the report was not read in its entirety. Those watching the trial were left with disturbing images of violence in Syria.

On day 28, bright sun greeted those involved in the Koblenz trial – a stark contrast to the dark stories they heard in court. In the morning, two Federal Criminal Police (BKA) officers from Meckenheim were questioned, one of whom the investigator in the al-Khatib trial. The presiding judge first asked the witnesses to explain the origin of the documents and information, some of which they had personally verified for the BKA and which were used as evidence to indict Anwar R and Eyad A. For that, those visiting the court needed background information: within the framework of structural investigations into Syria, the BKA has been collecting evidence since 2011 that can be used in court proceedings, such as the al-Khatib trial.

The first witness gave a calm and detailed account of how he obtained reports from the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and what he did based on the information in the reports. He described arbitrary detentions by the Syrian secret services and the inhumane conditions in Assad government prisons. Since the judges wanted to compare information, especially on conditions in detention, the witness detailed his findings on torture methods and prisoners’ causes of death, such as the “flying carpet,” electric shocks and pulling fingernails. In some cases, the judges projected brutal images from the UN report on the wall.

Then the witness discussed the important work of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. The nonprofit organization researches and documents human rights violations, which it shares with the international criminal justice system. CIJA also provided the BKA with information on Anwar R and Branch 251.

Questioning the second witness went much faster. After only half an hour, the BKA official was dismissed. The judges asked him the same questions as the first witness, whose answers he confirmed.

Finally, the judges came to the last item on the day’s agenda: reading two documents on human rights violations in Syria in 2011 and 2012 by the UN and the UN General Assembly. This was necessary because everything that can be used as evidence must be formally and publically introduced in court, including UN reports. Reading the lengthy documents aloud took several hours. They were also simultaneously translated into Arabic so that the defendants could understand every word.

The UN, which is otherwise rather reserved and diplomatic, used surprisingly clear language in the reports, which honors its many interviews with survivors of persecution by the regime, as well as defectors. The reports outlines Syria’s modern history as well as the development – or more precisely, deterioration – of the human rights situation during the decades-long Hafiz and later Bashar al-Assad government rule. The texts speaks of people’s sheer fear of torture, abuse and murder. Among other things, it describes that soldiers were forced to shoot civilians, pregnant women did not dare enter hospitals, and parents were told to forget their “disappeared” children because they had no chance of seeing them again.

Shortly before the reports were read in full, a deafening alarm went off in the courthouse. A bomb threat and ensuing emergency evacuation abruptly ended the day.

On days 26 and 27 of the al-Khatib trial, the judges, prosecutors, lawyers and public in the gallery found themselves in a completely new situation: Riad Seif, the only witness summoned for these two days of the trial, testified via video. Seif – a prominent and longtime Syrian opposition leader – is ill, which is why the Koblenz court made it possible for him to testify via video from the Berlin Regional Court.

Seif began his testimony with a detailed report about his personal background, professional career as a textile manufacturer, and finally his life as an opposition politician. The 73-year-old meticulously contextualized the political and economic developments in Syria since the begin of the Assad family’s rise to power. In this context, the witness emphasized several times, “Everything that we have experienced in Syria since 1963 follows orders from the top. Nobody does anything unless Assad orders it. Whatever happens is under Assad’s command.”

In 1994, Seif was elected to the Syrian parliament, and became prominent for his critiques of the government’s economic and financial policies. This ultimately made him an enemy of the Assad regime. The consequences, Seif told the court, were not only attacks on and persecution of him and his company, but also the “disappearance” of his son in 1996. Seif was reelected to parliament in 1998.

When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seized power after his father Hafiz al-Assad’s death, Seif hoped for political and economic reforms. As one of the initiators of the 2001 “Damascus Spring” he organized meetings, lectures and rallies with hundreds of participants. These led to his first arrest in September 2001 and a five-year conviction for “attacks on state authority.” At that time, the conditions of his detention were far less harsh than what he experienced during later imprisonments and interrogations in 2006, 2008 to 2010 and 2011.

Seif knows the al-Khatib prison well – he testified that he was detained and interrogated there several times. In February 2006, he was once forced to wait for his interrogation for several hours outside in the piercing cold. He saw instruments of torture – batons, iron bars and whips – but was not tortured himself. Seif emphasized that the conditions in the Adra prison from January 2008 to July 2010 were even worse. He was put in a cell with convicted criminals, the conditions and interrogation methods were inhumane.

Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to participate in the peaceful protests against Assad from March 2011 onwards. At that time, Seif testified that the security forces, in particular the secret services, acted with increasing brutality. In October 2011, he experienced this first hand when a group of secret service agents ruthlessly beat him up. In June 2012, he decided to leave Syria. He now lives in Berlin.

It was in Germany that he first heard about the main defendant, Anwar R. Seif explained that this contact was initiated in August 2013. At the request of an old friend, Seif’s son-in-law asked him to support a Syrian secret service officer who had defected. Anwar R comes from Hula, which is largely inhabited by Sunnis. After family members were killed in a massacre in May 2012, he renounced the Assad government, fled to Jordan and feared for his life.

Seif explained that he advocated on behalf of Anwar R at the German Foreign Office to support a defector from Assad’s system of repression. He also hoped to obtain some information about the fate of detained regime critics, since Anwar R was a high-ranking officer in the General Intelligence Service. “But nothing came from Anwar R,” Seif testified. “Not a word.” Seif told the court he did not know if Anwar R had contact with the Syrian opposition while he was the head of the investigation unit in al-Khatib.

In response to questions from the judge and Anwar R’s defense attorneys, Seif repeated, “I do not know the man personally. I cannot say that he was close to the opposition in Syria and also cannot confirm that he helped prisoners.” Although there are Syrians who supported the defendant and publicly posted positive comments about him on social media, this is outweighed by the various individuals who spoke up and reported torture in al-Khatib. Their statements incriminate the main defendant. Seif’s witness testimony did not exonerate Anwar R in any way.

Hussein Ghrer, one of the joint plaintiffs and torture survivors ECCHR supports, was focused and determined when he arrived at court. On day 25 of the al-Khatib trial, he was the only witness to be heard. On his way to court, he was accompanied by ECCHR partner lawyers Patrick Kroker and Sebastian Scharmer, as well as a German TV team. Ghrer’s two sisters and brother-in-law travelled from the Netherlands to attend the hearing, and joined the crowded public gallery.

Ghrer, a software engineer, began by testifying about his career and political activism in Syria. While studying in Damascus, he founded an anonymous blog critical of the Assad government. In 2010, he began working as a trainer for BBC Media Action, a media development organization. When the peaceful protests against the Assad government started in 2011, Ghrer joined several demonstrations. There, he saw the police and army shoot crowds with live ammunition – and saw people dying. He photographed and filmed these violent crackdowns on the peaceful demonstrators.

On 24 October 2011, Ghrer was sitting in a restaurant with a young Syrian journalist when he was arrested. He was first taken to Branch 40, and transfered to Branch 251 of the General Intelligence Directorate a few hours later. At this point, the judge asked how he could be certain of this. He replied that he was not blindfolded during the short drive to Branch 40, and during his transfer to Branch 251, he could follow the roads taken despite being blindfolded. His fellow prisoners also confirmed that he was in Branch 251.

Ghrer was detained in the al-Khatib Branch for 10 to 15 days. He could not say for sure, since his cell was in the basement without daylight. His description of the cell, however, were all the more precise: two by three meters, a small barred window, a metal door with a ventilation slit and a flap for serving food. At times, up to 25 detainees were imprisoned here, forced to drink from a hose in the cell’s toilet and take shifts to sleep. The judges compared his descriptions with sketches Ghrer drew during his interview with the German Federal Criminal Police, which were projected onto a large screen in the courtroom.

The interrogations – and torture that was simultaneously inflicted upon him – usually took place in the hallway, Ghrer testified. Through the door flap, he was able to see how other prisoners were mistreated. He also saw one woman, and heard other women’s voices. Ghrer was almost always tortured during his five interrogations. “I was blindfolded and had to lie on my stomach with my feet facing up. The interrogator sat opposite me; behind me stood a guard. If the interrogator did not like my answers, the guard would strike at his order. Sometimes with a military belt, sometimes a thick wire. My feet were red, blue and so swollen that the walk back into the cell was another torture,” explained Ghrer. Giving those detailed descriptions was visibly hard for him, so the presiding judge interrupted the questioning.

After a short break, Ghrer continued his testimony unperturbed. Once he had been brought into a room full of torture instruments. “I was not blindfolded, so I could see an apparatus for electric shocks, dozens of cables, belts and batons. This was obviously meant to intimidate me. The same goes for the guard who was playing with pliers in front of me, with which they were known to pull prisoners’ fingernails.”

Another time, he was taken to the office of an apparently high-ranking official. His other interrogator addressed the man with as “sir.” The senior official threatened his subordinate: “Either you get the names out of him or you’ll end up like him.”

Whether that high-ranking official was Anwar R, the main defendant in the al-Khatib trial, could not be clarified today. However, Ghrer emphasized that he would be able to accurately recall the sound of the official’s voice. Anwar R’s defence lawyer quickly clarified that Anwar R will not provide any samples of his voice now or in the future.

At the end of the day, ECCHR’s partner lawyers, who represent Ghrer as well as joint plaintiff Wassim Mukdad, made a statement regarding the previous day’s hearing: Anwar R declared in his 18 March 2020 statement that he personally interrogated Mukdad. Mukdad, in turn, testified in court that his interrogation was always conducted by one man – the man that always gave orders to torture him. Therefore, the person responsible for Mukdad’s torture can only be Anwar R.

Day 24 of the al-Khatib trial started in an unexpected way: before the hearing began, the presiding judge informed those present of a preliminary injunction by the German Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court decided on 18 August, only a few hours before today’s hearing, that from now on all accredited journalists must have the chance to follow the trial in Arabic.

The Koblenz court directly implemented this decision: it allowed accredited journalists to listen to the simultaneous Arabic interpretation that was already being provides to parties to the trial. Two Syrians directly tried to make use of this, one of whom had submitted the request to the Constitutional Court. The problem was that both Syrians, although they have attended every single day of the trial, are not accredited journalists. There were even enough headsets available, but nevertheless the judge refused them access  due to their lack of accreditation. Most of those present did not understand this decision, including German journalists.

Then the judge finally opened the hearing. She first read the Constitutional Court’s decision aloud in full, and called the only witness of the day: torture survivor, witness and joint plaintiff Wassim Mukdad. Mukdad is supported by ECCHR and represented in court by ECCHR partner lawyers Patrick Kroker and Sebastian Scharmer.

The Syrian witness made clear from the beginning that it was important for him to testify in German – a first in the trial. Mukdad reported how he and two friends had been walking through Duma, a city near Damascus, in September 2011, looking for a demonstration that they wanted to join. He said that he regularly attended protests although they had become increasingly dangerous. The police often violently clashed with demonstrators, even shooting with live ammunition. He had never seen a protest without police interference. Mukdad testified that on that day, many military and security personnel were in the streets. In the end, they took him and his friends into custody. They were then insulted, kicked and beaten. A policeman or soldier broke one of his rips. Others set the detainees’ hair on fire. Finally, busses carried them to prison: the al-Khatib Branch.

Wassim Mukdad was held there for five days. He shared his small cell (approximately six square meters) with up to nine other detainees. He was interrogated three times. Always by the same interrogator and following the same routine: prison guards took him out of his cell, blindfolded him and brought him to the interrogation room. There he was forced to lie down on his stomach, legs bent with his feet facing up. If the interrogator disliked Mukdad's answers, he ordered his torture. “It was always the same procedure: I said something, was hit, and so on,” Mukdad explained calmly. They specifically aimed to hit the soles of his feet, but also his heels and legs. “They knew exactly how to inflict maximum pain.” Mukdad disclosed his own personal triumph over the situation: “I lay down on my hands. I’m a musician and I was afraid they were going to hurt my hands. This was my way of putting up resistance.”

He was interrogated by one man. Mukdad was sure he would recognize that man's voice, it was so imprinted in his memory. But as before, the main defendant Anwar R refused to speak, so it could not be verified that he had been Mukdad’s interrogator. During his interrogation, Mukdad mainly gaves names of people he knew were “burned” – names that the state already knew. He and his friends had prepared for such a situation. And anyway, the interrogations were not about gaining information. The Syrian state wanted to systematically terrorize the population so that no one would dare oppose it.

After five days in Branch 251, Mukdad was brought to Kafr Sousa, the General Intelligence Directorates’ administrative center. There he was not tortured. But conditions in the mass cells were horrendous: no splace to sleep, terrible hygienic conditions, poor and not enough food, and diseases that spread among the detainees. “Now, in times of the coronavirus, detention there would be a death sentence,” Mukdad said.

Finishing his testimony, Mukdad addressed the court to pointedly stress that he is glad that Anwar R and Eyad A are facing trial in Germany – in fair proceedings that follow the rule of law. This is not currently possible in Syria.

The court took two days for this special witness. Neither the judges nor the parties to the trial knew his name. Disguised with a wig and fake beard, he did not enter the courtroom via the witness waiting room as usual. Instead, he was led through the door normally only used by  the accused. The witness’ whereabouts during breaks was kept secret. In response to questions that might have revealed his identity, his lawyer answered, “We will not disclose that information.” All this was necessary because, according to his lawyer, disclosing the witness’ identity would severely endanger his family.

The witness worked for the Syrian secret service for over 20 years. On day 22 and 23 of the trial, he shared impressively detailed knowledge of the internal procedures and responsibilities of various intelligence departments. He explained how chains of command functioned, employees’ roles in the intelligence service, and the leeway they did – or did not – have in fulfilling their role.

During his testimony, organizational charts drawn by the witness were projected onto a big screen behind the judges. The first two hours of his testimony were technical, but then he began to speak about what was behind the charts. All Syrian prisons were very crowded. The secret services tortured prisoners with various brutal methods. People were killed. Branch 251 had a particularly bad reputation.

The witness also made clear how the system worked. Prisoners were blackmailed into spying on fellow prisoners. There were no “correct” answers in interrogations, as they were more about exacting revenge than gathering information. The accusations prisoners were supposed to “confess” had already been established anyway.

The testimony was given confidently, with a powerful voice. It was so detailed that day 22 of the trial lasted well into the afternoon. After the presiding judge dismissed the witness, there was still the issue of potential witnesses that Anwar R mentioned in his statement. The representative of the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office systematically argued why the court did not need to and should not hear any of these witnesses. This position was filed and will be sent to the parties soon.

On day 23 of the trial, the disguised witness again entered the courtroom through the door otherwise reserved for the accused. Before parties to the trial could question him, the witness took the floor. He wanted to correct his previous statement from yesterday. He said he had not accurately reflected the size of a secret service department. After he did so, the parties to the trial asked for further details. When exactly was the state of emergency declared in Syria? How did prisoners arrive in prison?  

Again and again, the defense asked the witness how he knew this information. Like the day before, he gave calm and detailed answers. When the defense tried to find out more about where the witness’s knowledge came from, his lawyer replied he would not answer. The defense objected to the witness’ refusal to answer twice, and demand that the court rule of the scope of the witness’ protection. Both times the judges ruled that answering the questions could allow conclusions to be drawn about the witness’ identity, and therefore they did not need to be answered.

The witness was only shaken once. A joint plaintiff lawyer asked if there had been sexual violence in Syrian detention centers. The witness took a deep breath before telling several brutal cases.

At noon, the witness left the courtroom, accompanied by the Federal Criminal Police, in disguise without having let any hints about his identity slip. This was a clear sign of the seriousness of the crimes being tried in Koblenz, and the risks some of those involved are taking to address them.

Day 21 of the al-Khatib trial in Koblenz began routinely. The only witness for the day, a Syrian man, spoke of his detention. He calmly and soberly reported how he was arrested in the streets, brought to the al-Khatib branch, questioned and quickly released. He did not relate any details of his time in prison. When the presiding judge enquired directly about abuse, the witness took a deep breath – but stayed vague. The judge had to pose very specific questions to hear details about prison cell size, food, and other aspects of his detention. The witness’ report only became more detailed when she asked about his interrogation.

The picture this witness painted completely contradicted previous witness testimony. He said people were very friendly and polite to him at al-Khatib. This might have been the case because he worked in Syrian government administration. In any case, he testified that he was not mistreated and after his interrogation, he was promised he would soon be set free. He and the other inmates did hear others being tortured, however.

The witness’ testimony was suddenly interrupted when one of the judges asked the witness if he knew the defendants. The witness said he was not sure, he would like to ask Anwar R some questions to make sure they had not met.

Nobody had been expecting this extraordinary request. Before Anwar R was asked to answer the witness’ questions, those involved in the trial were given some time to adjust to this new situation. During the short break, the defense lawyers gathered, some joint plaintiff lawyers spoke amongst themselves, and the judges withdrew to their chambers. The tension was palpable. Everybody waited to see if Anwar R would agree to answer the witness’ questions. Ten minutes later, after the presiding judge restarted the trial, a defense lawyer made clear that Anwar R would remain silent. The witness’ questions were not admitted.

Despite this unspectacular resolution, the trail did not return to its calm course. Short arguments broke out in court. Several warnings were issued that further questioning of the witness should not assume that he had identified Anwar R. The lawyers discussed whether certain questions were allowed in this context. Again, the judges withdrew to chambers, this time to formally discuss a question’s admissibility – a first in this trial.

After this, questioning ensued about certain aspects of the witness’ previous testimony to the police and German migration office. Some details he did not remember at all, others he remembered differently. Public prosecutors and lawyers for the defense and joint plaintiffs tried to find out where the differences between today’s and previous testimonies lay.

The many questions on specific details increasingly confused the witness. He became vague and asked for a lawyer. The judges called another recess. After five minutes, they stated that the witness would not need legal counsel. The presiding judge assured the man that the questioning was almost over. She was right, the witness was soon dismissed. And thus, this rather turbulent day at court ended abruptly.

It was an unsettling day in court. The day began with a short wait, as one of the defendants was late. Those present in the courtroom used the time to chat or simply enjoyed the sun shining through the secured windows. As soon as all parties arrived, the presiding judge called the only witness of the day. Much of this witness’ testimony was similar to yesterday’s witness testimony: today's witness was also arrested because his identity card showed a suspicious city as his place of origin. He was also thrown into an overcrowded cell in the al-Khatib detention center. He recounted how the prisoners assigned each other small areas of the cell; how some had no place to sit and were forced to stand until a space was free. Those who stood up immediately lost their seat. When prisoners had to leave the cell, they had to step on fellow prisoners – there was no free floor space. The witness did not see daylight nor feel fresh air until he was taken to be interrogated.

When he recounted this, the otherwise very concentrated and objective witness laughed. Since he could never sleep in the cell, but had some light and fresh air when he was brought to be interrogated, he simply fell asleep. But the absurdity of the moment could not hide the seriousness of the situation. The witness was quick to point out that he had been severely mistreated. So many things happened during his imprisonment – too little and bad food, serious abuse, threats – that he could not recount everything. Once, the torture was so severe that he even tore his restraints. At that time, he wished he would die.

After a short lunch break, the testimony continued. The witness talked about the time after his imprisonment. He seemed more and more uneasy and began to shiver while talking about the consequences of his time in detention, such as anxiety and insomnia. Visibly moved, he explained that what he had seen and experienced was something he would and could never forget. He never imagined that such brutality was possible. Even for the audience who could only see the witness’ back, it was obvious how deeply these memories hurt. When he began to cry, the presiding judge interrupted the hearing. The judges exited the courtroom and the witness withdrew into a separate room for witnesses. The majority of those attending the hearing remained seated in silence.

When the proceedings continued ten minutes later, the presiding judge briefly assured herself that the witness was well. After a brief “all is well,” he was questioned by all the parties to the trial and patiently answered. During his testimony, he used a laser to point to aerial photographs that were projected onto a large screen behind the judge’s bench. After more than four hours, the judge finally dismissed the witness by thanking him, as she had done the day before. Over these four hours, none of those present could have failed to notice what the torture in the al-Khatib branch meant for those detained there. Eight years passed between these events and the witness’ testimony today. Some memories had faded, but others were as vivid as ever.

The atmosphere was relaxed when those involved in the al-Khatib trial slowly gathered in room 128 of the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz. After a three-week break, they greeted each other amicably, some stood together to exchange a few words. After the five judges entered the courtroom, the presiding judge casually noted the attendance of the parties to the trial.

The mood quickly changed when the witness invited to testify entered the room. Through a side door, a tall man stepped in hesitantly. After he gave the presiding judge his personal details, he began to speak.

In 2012, at the age of 22, he was arrested while on his way to work by a pro-government militia in Damascus. The problem was that his passport showed Aleppo as his place of origin – an administrative error, since he had been living and working in Damascus for a long time. The militia took him and several others into custody. When they pushed him into a cell, he did not fall to the ground as expected; the cell was already so crowded that he fell on other prisoners. Militia members sprayed him and his fellow prisoners with gasoline, and he heard them discuss if someone should light a cigarette and throw it into the cell. At that moment, the witness thought for the first time that he would die. 

Rather than being lit on fire, they were beaten and taken to the al-Khatib branch. There, he and his fellow prisoners were again dragged into a crowded cell. When the presiding judge asked for details about the situation in the cell, the witness stood up and, in front of the judge’s bench, showed how the several hundred prisoners in that cell could only sit with drawn-up knees. Some sat in other prisoners’ laps. As soon as someone stood up, they could not sit down again, as someone else immediately occupied their spot. It almost became cheerful in the courtroom when the witness recounted how the prisoners almost cried when a particularly large man was once brought into the cell – it was already crowded enough in there. But that moment only lasted a few seconds. The stories about skin diseases, the stench, the constant mistreatment, humiliation, and the insufficient and bad food were too serious. The witness did not know for how long he was imprisoned like that, as there was no daylight in the cell; he could only estimate two to three weeks. On several occasions, he was taken to an interrogation room where he was abused and forced to answer questions.

After his account, all parties to the trial questioned the witness, for example about details of his abuse and the content of the interrogations. When the presiding judge expressed her gratitude towards the witness, the courtroom’s initially relaxed atmosphere had disappeared for good. The arbitrary nature of Syria’s torture system was convincingly demonstrated to everyone in the courtroom. The witness was severely maltreated for several weeks just because of an administrative error on his identity card. He emphasized this arbitrariness again and again. What torments him the most to this day is the “why.” Why did he and his fellow prisoners have to experience all this? The witness was only on his way to work. Another prisoner sold vegetables in the wrong place.

His time in the al-Khatib branch affected him greatly. After the witness was released from detention and in terrible condition, the first thing he said to his family was “May God do everything in his power to ensure I no longer stay in this country.” He left Syria in 2013.

On day 18 of the al-Khatib trial, noticeably fewer people attended the trial compared to its beginning. Still about ten people – Syrian and German activists, journalists and others – watched the trial. This has been the case on most days since the trial started on 23 April. The gallery was never empty, people have come daily to document and report on the trial. Today, the two accused and their lawyers changed seats after the defense lawyers requested a seat from where they can better see witnesses. The courtroom is still full of Plexiglas walls between seats due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Before witness questioning could begin, the presiding judge warned a journalist in the audience after he took photographs in the courtroom without permission. The presiding judge stressed – again – that image and sound recordings are prohibited in German court proceedings. In the future, she may fine anyone who disrespects this.

On day 18, the only witness summoned to court was Mr A, a cousin of the accused Eyad A, who also lives in Germany. The witness reported that he was always interested in politics. When the uprising started in Syria in March 2011, he went to demonstrations and even tried to organize public gatherings himself.

After a failed demonstration in April 2011, the witness said he was arrested at an internet café while writing about the meeting online. Security forces had apparently followed him there. Mr A testified that he then brought to the Palestine department. He said the intelligence agencies were known as “butcher shops made to slaughter people.” In this context, it seemed all the more surprising that his interrogator emphasized that he just wanted to talk to him, as the witness recounted. Mr A said he was insulted but never beaten – unlike other detainees he saw in the department’s hallways who sat on the floor facing the wall, hands clasped behind their heads, who were beaten and humiliated whenever department staff passed them. Mr A stated that he was released from the department after 10 hours – with the absurd advice that he could always contact the department if he needed help, or even share information with department staff. When questioned by the court, the witness said that he never responded to this offer, which seemed to be an attempt to recruit him. He said that he could not explain why he was treated so exceptionally. Despite the mild outcome of his arrest, he told the court that he did not leave the house for weeks out of fear.

Mr A said that he did not find it problematic that his cousin was a member of the security forces, even though he was imprisoned and witnessed the services’ brutal behavior during demonstrations. The witness stated that Eyad A had repeatedly spoken out in support of the uprisings, passed on information when he found out that acquaintances were at risk of being arrested, and made disparaging remarks about some brutal colleagues. This statement seemed to surprise and bewilder the audience, as well as the associate judge, who repeatedly asked the witness whether if he had not found it difficult, as someone critical of the Syrian government, to be in close touch with his cousin who worked for the government. Did he not wonder how Eyad A’s words, that he supported the uprisings, could fit with his work in the security forces? Had the witness, as supporter of the opposition, never been worried about his cousin’s activities? Mr A always replied no.

According to Mr A, he did not know what exactly his cousin’s tasks were in the security forces. He said he did know that his cousin volunteered for the job, and previously worked as a physical education teacher, and then in Syria’s Ministry for Religious Affairs. However, the cousins never discussed Eyad A’s activities. Nor was the witness able to say whether Eyad A had ever worked at Branch 40. Mr A only mentioned that the accused often spoke about Hafiz Makhlouf’s brutal behavior, also towards his employees. At the time, Makhlouf was the head of Branch 40.

The judges reminded the witness that he was obliged to tell the truth, and repeatedly referred to his fall 2019 statement to the police, in which he was able to elaborate much more on his cousin’s activities, as well as Eyad A’s involvement in Branch 40. Although sections of the police statement were read out to him, the witness stuck to his testimony that Eyad A never told him about his exact tasks at work. Mr A was therefore unable to comment on the German federal prosecutor’s accusation that Eyad A helped bring people to Branch 251.

On 2 July, steps away from where visitors, administrators and journalists queued to enter the court for day 15 of the al-Khatib trial, once again 122 photographs of disappeared Syrians had been placed. The photographs, which included men, women and children, were laid flat on the ground and decorated with white flowers, in memoriam. The exhibition was organized by Families for Freedom, a women-led movement of Syrian families mobilized against unlawful detention and disappearances. Once inside the courtroom, visitors could still see the work of conceptual artist and activist Khaled Barakeh, who had organized an exhibition the day before (see court report day 15). Fifty figures dressed by the artist in clothing from the Syrian diaspora had been gathered as if in silent demonstration. The exhibition was an echo of anger and dismay felt about those who disappeared, their fists raised against the very crimes the al-Khatib trial’s defendants are charged with.

The testimony of one major witness, Mr I, was featured on the 16th and 17th day of court. His testimony was detailed, convincing and delivered with confidence. He worked as a guard in Branch 251 from 2011 until summer 2012. Mr I testified that Anwar R – whom he identified in the courtroom – was present in Branch 251 through the time the witness left his post. In painstaking detail, he took the court through a drawing he had made of Branch 251. As he described the layout of the site, again and again, the prosecutors and judges’ questions focused on one crucial point – the location of the detention cells in relation to the offices of Anwar R and his colleagues. The reason was clear: they were seeking to establish Anwar R’s knowledge of the torture and mistreatment in the al-Khatib branch. Mr I described how, even from his post outside the buildings of the branch, he observed the mistreatment and subsequent detention of hundreds of people arriving at Branch 251 as they were ushered into investigation rooms or into detention. He also described hearing them calling out in pain from the branch’s basement while they were being beaten, sobbing that they “had done nothing.”

The witness’ sketch demonstrated the proximity of Anwar R’s office to the torture sites. Anwar R had insisted in his recorded statement that he had no knowledge of it. In the view of many spectators, the witness’ testimony further eroded the credibility of Anwar R’s statements before the court (see court report day 5).

Testimony from the police and migration officers who conducted Mr I’s initial interviews was given on 3 July, day 16 of the trial. Their testimony was in keeping with Mr I’s, and lent support to the impression that Mr I’s recollections and reflections in court were consistent with his earlier testimony.

Near the end of the session, the counsel for a civil plaintiff moved to hear an additional witness. The witness, who lives in Turkey, was a popular imam who was held in Branch 251 and tortured in 2011.

In his motion, counsel described that as the witness was being released, he saw Anwar R being scolded by his superior for his decision to detain and torture such a popular religious figure. Later, after both Anwar R and the witness had fled Syria, Anwar R called the witness to say that he was sorry “for everything that had happened” and that they were “both on the same side now.” Hearing testimony from this witness, which would require diplomatic or technological support for German authorities, would further establish Anwar R’s knowledge of and authority for the detention, treatment and torture of those who languished and suffered in Branch 251.

They will not be silenced: this is the attitude Syrian activists protesting outside the court building in Koblenz have in common with the torture survivor who testified on day 15 of the al-Khatib trial.

In front of the courthouse: The artwork that Khaled Barakeh, conceptual artist and cultural activist from al-Golan, Syria, installed opposite a side entrance of the court is entitled “MUTE.” Fifty figures dressed in clothes belonging to Syrian activists in the diaspora “demonstrate” peacefully against the oppression, violence and crimes by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government. The art demonstration is supported by Adopt a Revolution, Families for Freedom, The Syrian Campaign and ECCHR.

“Artwork and legal action can complement each other. The common goal is a social process of coming to terms with torture and other crimes,” explained Andreas Schüller, head of ECCHR’s International Crimes and Accountability program, as to why ECCHR supports the project.

Barakeh’s art demonstration impacts those in courtroom 128. Judges, representatives of the German Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, lawyers for the joint plaintiffs, Anwar R and Eyad A’s defense lawyers, and almost all of the visitors stand by the windows to look at the “muted demonstrators.” The torture survivor who testifies today looks at the art after the hearing.

The 30-year-old, former hotelier and building contractor torture survivor from Sid Zaynab (10 kilometers south of Damascus), now a roofer in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, appears in court without a lawyer. After the judge informs the survivor about the formalities of the court, the Syrian begins to tremble noticeably, but quickly catches himself. He reports about the situation in his home region beginning in 2011, the Assad government’s pervasive violence, the Free Syrian Army, foreign militias, and internally displaced people, many women and children, most of them Sunni like himself. The fact that he gave shelter to the refugees put him in danger.

The witness reported that he was arrested in July 2012, and first imprisoned by the secret service in Sid Zaynab. Militiamen brutally tortured him for five days. Then he was transferred to the General Intelligence Service al-Khatib detention center, also known as Branch 251, which is at the core of this trial.

The witness testified to the drastic conditions in al-Khatib. He told the judge to imagine the mass cells as being like pig transporters or a pot of boiling noodles: filled with hundreds of naked and ill-treated people, crammed together in a very confined space. There were screams from other cells; injured people and corpses lay in the hallways. He experienced and saw much of this himself, partly hearing of it from other prisoners. Thanks to his fellow prisoners, he finally learned that he was imprisoned al-Khatib.

He was interrogated several times, but above all was beaten. It was not clear who exactly interrogated or tortured him, nor exactly when or where it happened from the witness’ statement. He mentioned Anwar R, the main accused, only in passing, and did not name Eyad A at all. The judges tried to sort out some of the contradictions to statements made to the police in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, in 2019. Nonetheless, some things remain unclear. The witness left no doubt about two points: he still suffers massively from the consequences of his imprisonment and torture, and he will not be silenced.

A cameraman took some final pictures of defendants Anwar R and Eyad A before day 13 of the al-Khatib trial kicked off in Koblenz courtroom 128. Testimony by a former Syrian General Intelligence Service employee – the first of the trial – and two Federal Criminal Police officers were planned.  It became quickly clear to those in court that the day would not go as planned.

A security guard accompanied the insider witness into the courtroom. He had slim shoulders, and was wearing a dark leather jacket and mask covering his mouth and nose: he seemed shy, maybe even frightened. Even visitors in the gallery could clearly see: he does not want to be here.

In 2015, the young Syrian fled to Germany. He studied electronic engineering and computer science in Syria – and worked in General Intelligence Service Branch 295 starting in November 2010. He worked in the central mail office and is assumed to have had access to the branch’s files, information on mass graves, and lists that the Tishreen, Mezzeh and Hamish hospitals sent to branch management. These lists documented how many and which bodies would be transported from intelligence branches and hospitals to Damascus mass graves. They listed hospital names, branch numbers, dates, and the numbers assigned to each corpse. The witness testified that it was generally known that these people would not have died from natural causes, but were killed by the secret services.

There was considerable confusion as soon as the judge began questioning the witness. Did he not understand the questions correctly? Was the translation problematic? The witness rarely seemed to answer questions at all, and avoided them, repeating himself. The judge and everyone else in the courtroom were growing impatient. Why did the witness’s testimony contradict what he told the police in previous months? Why did he now refuse to say anything concrete about the mass graves? He said he no longer remembered.

During police questioning in summer 2019, the witness said that he had seen defendant Eyad A – whom he already knew – and his unit near the mass graves. But the court could not extract any more details. The witness also stated that he had only met Eyad A once – again contradicting previous statements to the police.

The judge became indignant and the atmosphere in the courtroom changed perceptibly. She asked whether the witness was afraid. Did it have anything to do with the fact that his family – who lives in Turkey – had been threatened? Perhaps even by defendant Eyad A’s family? Shortly before the recess, the public prosecutor intervened. Did the witness understand that he was close to giving false testimony? Germany is trying to address the injustices in Syria. Does the witness understand that he has an obligation to assist Germany in this matter?

After the break, the courtroom was filled with nervous silence. Would the witness remember more now?

But he still had large gaps in his memory. On satellite pictures, he clearly identified branch buildings, intelligence service trainings camps, and the so-called martyr cemetery in Damascus. But when the public prosecutor questioned him, the witness evaded answering and contradicted himself, leading to the prosecutor snapping at him, “This is enough…You will answer this question now.”

That was all the courtroom heard from the witness: some general information about the intelligence service and the lists of the dead. The question remained: was the young man so afraid of Eyad A and his family that he did not dare testify against the defendant in court?

On the following day, the two Federal Criminal Police officers who questioned the Syrian witness in 2019 testified. Both stated that they had informed the witness of his rights and that they did not have the impression that he had any problems with the interpreters. The first officer said that the witness had not seemed frightened or insecure in any way. Both officers said that the witness provided detailed and credible information, for example on the mass graves that matched the results of their own investigations.

Lawyers for the defense and joint plaintiffs could only elicit some important details from the witness. In response to a lawyer for joint plaintiffs, the Syrian drew a sketch of the dead lists: including columns for names, hospital numbers, date of death, and delivery date of the bodies. The insider witness thereby made the Syrian intelligence services’ work eerily present in the Koblenz courtroom.

Persecution, forced disappearances and torture by the Syrian secret services: Syrian human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni has been working on these and other crimes by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government for more than 30 years. But that is not the only reason he was called as an expert witness on days 11 and 12 of the al-Khatib trial – he was detained himself in Branch 251, and personally knows the main defendant Anwar R from another branch. In addition, in 2012, he represented filmmaker and joint plaintiff Feras Fayyad, who testified on days 10 and 11 of the trial (see day 10/11 trial report).

Al-Bunni is well-known among the Syrian exile community and all those interested in the Syrian human rights situation, so many visitors and journalists were waiting to enter the courthouse to hear his testimony. Prior to his court appearance, however, al-Bunni took few minutes to participate in a Families for Freedom  sit-in with Wafa  Mostafa, an activist whose father has been imprisoned for nearly 7 years, and his former client Fayyad,  amid portraits of 61 Syrians who Assad’s security forces have disappeared.

In court, al-Bunni got to the point right away: the al-Khatib trial is about much more than the crimes Anwar R and Eyad A are accused of committing. For decades, the Assad family has used arbitrary detention and torture to stay in power, he testified.

Al-Bunni was first arrested in 1978. He was detained for one week and tortured in Syrian General Intelligence Service branch 251, the very prison in which defendant Anwar R reportedly led the investigations department years later.

Al-Bunni stated that he did not meet Anwar R until 2006. At that time, he had been a lawyer for almost 20 years, representing members of the opposition and countless other government critics. On the evening of 17 May 2006, he was arrested and taken to branch 285, where Anwar R worked at the time. Fifty men were crammed into about 20 square meters, the Syrian lawyer described. At night, he heard terrible screams from other cells and the prison hallways, a clear indication that prisoners were being tortured, he recounted.

Almost exactly five years later, al-Bunni was released (from Adra prison where he had been transferred). The witness emphasized that the Assad government massively intensified its the repression and torture of alleged critics in response to the peaceful protests at the time, saying, “Before 2011, Assad’s people tried to obtain information through torture. From 2011 on, it was all about revenge. Those who demanded freedom were tortured, sometimes to death.”

Al-Bunni spoke of many details he learned from numerous clients who were held in the al-Khatib prison after 2011, where they were severely tortured before being transferred to branch 285 for further interrogation. He saw people who looked like ghosts after their release, al-Bunni said.

The judge then questioned the witness about the photos documenting the bodies of thousands of prisoners, which former Syrian military police employee “Caesar” smuggled out of the country and shared with German judicial authorities. Al-Bunni in detail explained the system of numbering corpses, which provides information about their deaths in various Syrian secret service prisons.

Day 11 of the al-Khatib trial, as expected, was also about when, where and how the witness met the main defendant Anwar R in Germany. Al-Bunni reported that their paths first crossed in Germany in fall 2014 or winter 2014/15, initially in the Marienfelde refugee camp in Berlin. Later, al-Bunni ran into Anwar R at a hardware store.

Day 12 of the trial focused on al-Bunni’s comprehensive knowledge of the Syrian security apparatus and the al-Khatib prison – the different secret services’ roles and responsibilities, individuals and subdivisions’ function in this system, geographical and spatial conditions, and different torture methods, including sexual and gender-based violence, and their long-term consequences. The witness repeatedly referred to his research and accounts of numerous clients – torture survivors and their relatives – for legal proceedings.

Some of al-Bunni’s testimony clearly conflicted aspects of Anwar R’s statement (see day 5 trial monitoring). According to al-Bunni, Sunnis (such as Anwar R) were able to have careers in the secret service careers, and some were known to treat prisoners particularly brutally. Al-Bunni rejected the assertion that in 2011, sub-division 40, led by Hafiz Makhlouf, took control of the al-Khatib prison.

Days 10 and 11 of the al-Khatib trial were important, especially for Syrian victims and activists as a torture survivor testified for the first time. Also a first in the trial: a lot of Arabic was spoken. Feras Fayyad, a Syrian filmmaker and joint plaintiff, sat before the judges with his translator on his left and lawyer on his right. Fayyad spoke Arabic loud enough for the room to hear; his interpreter then translated into German. Finally, the numerous Syrian activists and torture survivors in the gallery could understand what was being said in the courtroom.

Fayyad spoke about his life as a student and filmmaker in Syria, and about the moment that changed everything – the beginning of protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government on 15 March 2011. Fayyad reported that he took his camera and tried to document as much as possible, especially the demonstrations. He taught others to do the same. He filmed the police arresting people, shooting demonstrators, beating them with clubs, and teargassing crowds. He was sure that the Syrian government was targeting him for his work.

In his first arrest, Fayyad was abducted by the Air Force Intelligence Service. He saw small children and dead bodies in the detention center he was brought to. Before his second arrest, a friend warned him that he was in danger of arrest. Fayyad testified that he wanted to move to Dubai and take his footage with him, but he was arrested at the airport. He was first taken to the Information Department; after a few days he was transferred to al-Khatib branch 251.

Fayyad described a so-called welcome party, during which guards violently beat new detainees upon arrival. The filmmaker was forced to strip naked. For a few days, he was incarcerated in a mass cell that was so crowded, people tried to sleep while standing. Over and over, he told the court about terrible screams and his mortal fear, people he was not sure were dead or alive. Fayyad spent most of his detention in al-Khatib in a solitary cell. A judge showed a sketch of the prison, its interrogation rooms and cells, which the witness drew during previous police questioning in Germany.

The filmmaker was interrogated at least three times in al-Khatib. He was blindfolded, but could partially recognize his surroundings, including the man who interrogated him. Back in his mass cell, Fayyad had heard the name Anwar R for the first time from other prisoners. Later, he said that he recognized Anwar R as his interrogator from photos in the media, and during police questioning in Berlin.

In court, Fayyad said that the defendant looked a little different in those days, but he was 60 to 70 percent sure that this was the man who interrogated him. He stated that he would probably be able to recognize his interrogator by his voice. But Anwar R continued to remain silent – and he would stay silent, his lawyer hurried to emphasize.

For the first time, not only reports and stories about torture in Syria were presented at court – but someone who experienced and survived this torture himself spoke out – one of the 4000 people included in Anwar R’s indictment.

The witness described beatings with hard cables and clubs on his feet and back that made him bleed, how he was hung by his hands, and sexual violence. He testified to conditions in the cells: little and often moldy food, hardly any water, inhumane hygienic conditions and no medical care. He was scared to death and almost certain that he would not leave al-Khatib alive.

Fayyad continues to feel the effects of torture: his hands and legs are in constant pain and he suffers from sleep disorders, anxiety and depression. Even now, he is afraid that the Syrian government might threaten his family, especially because of his testimony in the trial. Until now, he said, he simply tried to forget and suppress what happened to him in prison.

The filmmaker’s account was difficult for journalists and other visitors in court to listen to. This made Feras Fayyad’s message for the accused all the more astonishing: he was prepared to forgive Anwar R if he admitted to and apologized for what happened in al-Khatib – arbitrary violence and torture. But Fayyad believes that this will never happen, especially because Anwar R has denied all allegations against him.

The hearing ended at noon on 4 June. That afternoon, the trial continued with Syrian lawyer Anwar al-Bunni’s testimony.

Like the previous day of the al-Khatib trial, day 9 was quite short. Two witnesses were scheduled to testify about their questioning of defendant Anwar R during the Baden-Württemberg Criminal Police (LKA) state security department’s investigation of international crimes in Syria. An LKA chief detective and an interpreter had been summoned but the interpreter is currently abroad, and so was unable to appear in court.

The LKA chief detective who led the interrogation testified that he interviewed Anwar R as a witness in Stuttgart on 26 October 2017 in an investigation into possible crimes against humanity in Syria. The police officer recounted that another witness had named Anwar R as a potential witness. He recalled some of the witness interview from memory, and parts of the interrogation’s record were presented to him, section by section. The reading of this record brought some new details about Anwar R’s activities in Syria to light, overviewed the accused’s career and his position in the Syrian secret service, and provided information about his escape from Syria.

The chief detective reported that Anwar R described that he witnessed war crimes, for example dead bodies being brought to branch 251, among other things. Anwar R also told the LKA that up to 750 prisoners a day were taken to the al-Khatib branch.

When asked about how interrogations were conducted in Syria, Anwar R stated that some were “severe” because it was impossible to remain polite when interrogating so many people. This seemed cynical to some present in the courtroom, in light of the picture of the tortured, dead branch 251 prisoner shown in court the day before.

Since the LKA investigation back then focused on the activities of Syrian secret service branch 320 in Hama, Anwar R was not questioned in detail about branch 251. The LKA detective testified that after the interview, he forwarded the transcript to the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA). The BKA was to look into whether there was any suspicion that Anwar R might have committed a criminal offence.

After less than two hours, the only witness of the day was released without having been sworn in. The defense objected to the admission of the police officer’s statements, and will substantiate its objection in detail later in the trial.

Day 8 of the al-Khatib trial was rather short compared to previous days of the trial. The topic was Anwar R’s 2015 questioning when he filed charges because he was convinced that he was being followed by Syrian intelligence officials in Berlin (see trial monitoring day 6). Three witnesses were called: a chief inspector from the Berlin State Criminal Police (LKA) who led the interrogation, and a chief inspector and interpreter who attended it. The latter, however, was excused due to illness.

Before the hearing, Syrian activists from The Syria Campaign, Families for Freedom and Adopt a Revolution raised public attention in front of the court building. Holding a banner saying “Assad’s Syria = torture state #SyriaNotSafe!,” the group of ten reminded passersby by about the Syrian state’s human rights violations. At the same time, they drew attention to the “No deportations to Syria!” petition to Germany’s Regional Ministers of the Interior, asking to stop deportations to Syria because of the situation there. The activists also placed 40 framed photos on the steps in front of the court – portraits of people who have been tortured, murdered, disappeared or are still imprisoned in Syrian torture prisons under Bashar al-Assad’s government.

In court, the Berlin State Criminal Police officer testified first. He spoke in detail about Anwar R’s questioning on 27 February 2015, when the main defendant was firmly convinced that he had been recognized as a deserter by the Syrian secret service in Germany. He feared he would be kidnapped by the Syrian secret service and taken to Syria. According to the interrogation’s written record, on several occasions, Anwar R felt watched and persecuted by people of seemingly Syrian origin. For example, he reported an incident with a Syrian doctor where Anwar R felt threatened when a photo was taken for his patient file. This and other incidents made the accused feel so unsafe that he finally turned to the Berlin police (for details, see trial monitoring day 6).

Reading the record of the police interrogation did not bring any new details about the defendant’s activities in Syria to light. Remarkably, however: Anwar R himself stated his role as head of branch 251’s investigations department. From the LKA officer’s perspective, there was no reliable evidence of Anwar R’s alleged persecution. Upon the officer’s request, the assessment was shared by the German Federal Intelligence Service. The Public Prosecutor’s Office then closed the case.

The second witness, the chief inspector of the Berlin State Criminal Police, also attended Anwar R’s 2015 interrogation and confirmed it followed the appropriate procedure. She shared the first witness’s assessment that Anwar R seemed to really fear being attacked by the Syrian secret service, but she assessed the actual probability of this danger as being low.

Three witnesses were summoned on the seventh day of the al-Khatib trial. They all testified about defendant Eyad A’s interview at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in August 2018.  The central question was whether this interview is admissible in the current trial.

The BKA questioned Eyad A as a witness in structural investigations about Syria, not as a suspect in a criminal investigation. Accordingly, before his interview, he was informed of his rights as a witness, not a suspect. His defense counsel objected to the testimony’s admission during preliminary proceedings, and again at the beginning of the trial. Eyad A’s arrest warrant was even withdrawn during the preliminary proceedings. However, the Federal Court of Justice decided that part of the testimony was admissible, and Eyad A remanded in custody.

The first witness, a Federal Criminal Police officer, questioned Eyad A at the time. The officer reported that Eyad A was questioned as a witness in the context of the BKA’s structural investigations on Syria, based on a tip from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Was the BKA already aware of the special significance of intelligence service branch 251, and the accused’s role? The BKA officer testified that Eyad A was informed about his rights and obligations as a witness, including the right not to incriminate himself. The other witnesses called – the interpreter and the person recording his testimony – later confirmed this.

The BKA officer recalled Eyad A’s interview from memory, and then presented the accused’s entire recorded testimony, section by section – a long and painstaking process for all present. The extent of the Syrian secret service’s systematic brutality became frighteningly clear. For example, Eyad A told the BKA about prisoners’ screams that could even be heard in the prison cafeteria, and about the arbitrary shooting of peaceful demonstrators.

The Syrian people’s suffering was made clear when one of the so-called Caesar photos was shown at the trial for the first time: the body of a man killed by the Syrian secret service, emaciated and almost entirely naked. The Syrian secret services numbered the corpses to classify them – a card was placed in the killed man’s hands showing the number 251, the identification number of the al-Khatib prison. The picture dramatically illustrates the Syrian secret services’ violence and crimes. But it is just one of the many thousands of people who have lost their lives, been tortured and disappeared in Syrian secret service prisons like al-Khatib – and a reminder of the countless people who are still suffering there.

On the sixth day of the al-Khatib trial, the Koblenz court summoned two witnesses who testified on Anwar R’s February 2015 report to the Berlin police when he felt persecuted and threatened by the Syrian intelligence service.

The first witness, a police chief inspector, only somewhat remembered the situation five years ago. She said that compared to her daily work, this report was extraordinary. Anwar R turned up at the police station accompanied by a German mediator, because he spoke neither German nor English. They showed the policewoman documents that were also shown to everyone in the Koblenz courtroom. They were several pages long, in Anwar R’s handwriting in Arabic, with a German translation.

In 2015, Anwar R reported that he felt observed, persecuted and threatened. He feared that the Syrian intelligence service found him and planned to kidnap him. This is why he sought police protection. He signed the respective document not only with his name, but also – as ECCHR partner and joint plaintiff lawyer Sebastian Scharmer explicitly pointed out – his Syrian military rank: “Syrian citizen General Anwar R.” The policewoman filed the report and forwarded it to the regional criminal investigation department in Berlin so it could take a deeper look into the matter. She did not know what happened to the report after that.

The second witness was the woman who accompanied Anwar R to the police station that day as a mediator. However, as she made clear in the beginning of her testimony, she had hardly any recollection of that day. The political scientist and Islamic studies expert, a former German embassy employee in Damascus, met Anwar R after his arrival in Germany, and they had several long conversations to document and analyze the situation in Syria.

Anwar R was introduced to her as former high-ranking intelligence service general and part of the Syrian opposition. Was she suspicious of his role as an intelligence officer? Yes, but she hoped he could give her important insights into Syria. Of course, she was aware that someone working with Syrian intelligence would likely have some connection to human rights violations. She could only speculate about his motivation to leave Syria. In 2015, Anwar R called the witness several times and asked her for help, which is why she accompanied him to the police.

The judge, public prosecutor, and lawyers for the defense and joint plaintiffs questioned her as an expert witness. Her report blatantly contrasted many of Anwar R’s claims from the day before: she said it was common knowledge that the Syrian intelligence services committed human rights violations. During her time at the German embassy in Syria, she heard of documented torture cases in intelligence headquarters, including torture methods such as the so-called German chair, beatings on the feet, and beatings that killed people. She asserted that all of these methods had been used in Syria even before 2011.

Today was the day torture survivors and plaintiffs, human rights activists from Syria, Germany and France, as well as lawyers and journalists from around the world had been waiting for. The lawyers of the al-Khatib trial’s main defendant, Anwar R, announced that the former head of investigations at branch 251 of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s General Intelligence Directorate would give a statement to the court.

The first visitors began lining up in front of the court building at 6 am, but had to be patient until after 2 pm because the proceedings first dealt with the second defendant, Eyad A. Three witnesses, employees of the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, were questioned in detail about Eyad A’s asylum procedure.

After the lunch break, it was finally time: Anwar R’s lawyer Michael Böcker began to read his client’s 45-page statement. For over two hours, he took turns with his colleague Yorck Fratzky. They described Anwar R’s career in detail, including his studies, training and various career steps in the General Intelligence Directorate. The word “torture” was not uttered for the first 50 minutes. For the Syrian torture survivors in the courtroom, this presentation was unbearable to listen to. Also many journalists and others present could only shake their heads.

In essence, Anwar R’s statement argued he had done nothing wrong: it was others who mistreated and tortured prisoners. He was not able to do anything about it. He even tried to help individual prisoners. Anwar R pled innocent on all charges – including survivors’ specific allegations of torture that the prosecutors had read aloud at the trial’s beginning. Anwar R went so far as denying that any instruments or methods of torture were used at branch 251. The many pieces of evidence collected by the German Federal Criminal Police, detailed in the lead investigator’s testimony on day two of the trial, suggest the opposite.

Anwar R tried to play down his role and deny all responsibility. He stated that Tawfik Younes, head of branch 251, pressured him on several occasions, and restricted his authority in the beginning of June 2011. From then on, Anwar R claimed that he only did office work, wrote reports and conducted a few general interrogations.

Then the statement turned to why, when and how Anwar R deserted, and finally left Syria in 2012. The main defendant presented himself as a long-time supporter of the Syrian opposition. Finally, the statement named a number of people who could testify to this.

The statement was read in its entirety for over an hour and a half. After that, the fifth day of the al-Khatib trial ended very quickly. Anwar R’s statement did not clarify any issues at stake. It gave detailed explanations, but ultimately, was merely a schematic and blanket rejection of all accusations. The statement also contradicts, in part grotesquely, what has been reported for decades about the Syrian intelligence services’ system of torture. In any case, it was a slap in the face to everyone who has fought for years, even decades, to criminally address torture and other human rights crimes in Syria’s prisons, such as branch 251.

On day four of the trial, no joint plaintiffs were present in room 128 of the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany, but their lawyers, the defendants and their lawyers, interpreters, as well as about a dozen journalists and other interested parties, among them students and lawyers observing the trial. Three witnesses testified about Anwar R’s entry into Germany and the following asylum procedure – however, the court focused less on the witnesses, and more on the respective authorities’ documents.

The first witness, a Berlin-based employee of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge/BAMF) was questioned about Anwar R and his family’s 2015 asylum procedure. The witness talked so quickly the Syrian interpreters and lawyers taking notes could hardly keep up, and had to ask her to speak slower several times. Anwar R’s case met the asylum conditions, and because he had a visa in his passport allowing him to stay in Germany, BAMF did not hold hearings, and granted him asylum.

Finally, she detailed Anwar R’s path to asylum in Germany – with documents the judge showed the audience using an overhead projector. Starting with the asylum application, visas and various stamps in Anwar R’s passport – including one for entry at Berlin Tegel. The documents, which had apparently been copied many times, were often hardly legible for the visitors nor the judge. She and the senate tried to decipher the text on Anwar R’s visa.

The second witness, an officer at the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt), first described what she knew of Anwar R’s role in Syria’s exile opposition. She testified that as part of the opposition delegation, Anwar R participated in the Geneva II UN peace conference on Syria in January 2014. For her, this was fundamental proof of his role in the opposition at the time.

The witness was also questioned about the background of Anwar R’s entry into Germany. She stated that she only knew from filed documents that at the time, a Syrian opposition member spoke to the Foreign Office in Anwar R’s favor. The relevant documents were shown via overhead projector, for example Anwar R’s application to the Foreign Office with details of his profession: “colonel in state security administration.”

The senate and lawyers only had a few questions for each witnesses – the first part of the day ended after only an hour and a half, followed by a long lunch break.

In the afternoon, an Immigration Authority (Ausländerbehörde) employee testified. However, her hearing was concerned very briefly with what she came to say – she only gave a short statement on Anwar R’s May 2015 re-entry application from Turkey to Germany. At the time, Turkish authorities confiscated his Syrian passport on suspicion of forgery. However, this could not be definitely answered. The testimony focused on many documents establishing Anwar R’s identity, which her office collected. Again, the judge asked that many projected pages be read out loud. And again, the passport and entry visa were shown – this time even in a legible copy.

On day three of the trial, an expert ethnologist testified before the court. She previously wrote a report for the German Federal Public Prosecutor, analyzing the political situation in Syria in 2011 and President Bashar al-Assad government’s crackdown on the opposition and protest movement in 2011 and 2012.

The expert gave an overview of political developments in Syria, particularly since independence in 1946. She reported that as early as the 1970s, Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad restricted freedom of speech and cultivated a climate of fear, including by using torture time and again. After a short phase of political liberation and reform in 2000 (The Damascus Spring), Hafiz’ son and successor Bashar al-Assad continued the (brutal) oppression of political dissidents and the opposition.

In March 2011, protests against the government increased. The situation escalated when teenagers reportedly wrote the words “The people demand the regime’s end” on a wall. They were arrested, and returned from detention with signs of torture. This event horrified and angered the entire country, leading to widespread uprisings in March 2011 – and consequently, to the Syrian civil war.

The expert traced the course of the conflict in detail, and explained the role of the four intelligence services. She gave insights into detention facility conditions and torture methods, for example sexual violence. The torture techniques were often the same as were used against the opposition in the 1970s.

The ethnologist further testified about Syria’s demographics, in particular about religious majorities and minorities (Sunnis, Alawites and Christians), social power dynamics, the military’s role, as well as the Baath Party, which has ruled Syria since 1963 according to constitution and President Assad leads.

The senate, defense lawyers and joint plaintiffs’ lawyers questioned the ethnologist. The only joint plaintiff present on this day, Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad, also took the floor. He asked in Arabic (via court interpreters who translate for the defendants) to what extent the Assad government called the opposition terrorists.

After the first trial worldwide on state torture in Syria started the day before, a German Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) officer explained how investigations of defendants Anwar R and Eyad A were initiated and the previous steps taken.

The BKA officer, whom the court summoned as a witness, reported when and how German authorities heard about Anwar R and his alleged crimes, and how the investigative team and he personally checked and verified this information for the BKA. In addition to several technical details and explanations about how cooperation with investigative authorities in France, Sweden and Norway was carried out, the witness described specifics about the concrete alleged crimes.

People in the courtroom found his account of the different torture techniques particularly distressing. In his overview of witness testimonies, the officer detailed the especially brutal torture methods used in detention branch 251.

Public interest in the trial was unwavering – also today, most seats reserved for journalists were taken. The remaining seats were given to visitors, mainly Syrians.

We will all have to be patient for a long time. ECCHR believes the trial will stretch on for years. Lawyer Patrick Kroker who represents seven joint plaintiffs in the proceedings said that it was an important step for the trial to finally be opened, and meaningful that so many affected people, activists and lawyers from Syria could attend the trial’s first two days. Just the trial’s initiation gave many in and outside Syria hope that justice will be served to all victims of the Syrian government’s torture apparatus.

On 23 April 2020, the trial against Syrians Anwar R and Eyad A started at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany. Hours before the hearing began, those affected and activists from Syria, journalists from all over the world, as well as NGO representatives and other interested parties lined up in front of the court building – they all wanted to witness and document the long-expected opening of the first trial worldwide on state torture in Syria.

Fourteen international media representatives and 15 visitors were finally allowed to enter courtroom 128 – fewer people than usual, due to COVID-19 security measures. Plexiglas walls separated defendants, joint plaintiffs, lawyers and translators; the only way to effectively prevent possible infection. Before proceedings began, the presiding judge made sure that the defendants, their lawyers and translators could communicate flawlessly via intercom.

The defendants entering court – Anwar R undisguised, Eyad A with a hood pulled down over his eyes – was agonizing, not only for those affected sitting on benches for visitors: some of the joint plaintiffs and other torture survivors pointedly turned their backs on the two men. Others were waiting for this very moment and wanted to look the defendants in the eyes.

With the words “I charge,” Senior Public Prosecutor Jasper Klinge began reading the indictment. Anwar R is charged with complicity in 4000 cases of torture, 58 murders, and cases of rape and sexual assault. Klinge lists 24 cases of torture, Syrians’ fates are read out aloud 24 times: from their arrest to transport to the prison known as branch 251, where detainees suffered inhumane conditions and were subjected to brutal “interrogations” and torture, until their release. Anwar R, as stated in the indictment, must have known about the torture and at least tacitly accepted it.

The indictment also describes the political situation in Syria, the intelligence services’ role and makes clear: the case is about these two perpetrators. However, the court will also investigate the context in which the crimes were committed. The defendants were part of a system, after all. This trial will also be about the widespread and systematic torture of “inconvenient” citizens that Bashar al-Assad’s government has ordered for years.

Anwar R plans to give a written statement in the next few days; Eyad A remains silent.

“Today, I’ve seen a fair trial for the first time. We want the truth about Syria’s torture system to come to light,” said joint plaintiff Hussein Ghar after the trial’s opening. Wassim Mukdad, also a joint plaintiff, added, “This trial is not only important for me personally, but for everyone who is still detained in Syrian prisons, and for those who did not survive them. We want justice for all.”

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Definition

German Federal Public Prosecutor

The Office of the German Federal Public Prosecutor (Generalbundesanwaltschaft, GBA) is Germany’s highest prosecutory authority. The GBA is responsible for prosecutions in serious cases relating to crimes against international law and crimes concerning state security.

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Insight

Torture

The law is clear: torture is prohibited under any circumstances. Whoever commits, orders or approves acts of torture should be prosecuted. This is set out in the UN Convention against Torture which has been ratified by 146 states.

Failure to punish and acknowledge torture adds to the trauma of survivors and their families; individual as well as collective traumas persist. The cycle of torture, impunity and further injustice cannot be broken without addressing these crimes, including through the law. This is why – where torture is used as part of a policy – it is important to hold not only low-ranking perpetrators of torture accountable but also their superiors as well as political and military decision makers – including those from politically and economically powerful states.  

In the fight against torture, ECCHR works with survivors and partner organizations to pursue a variety of legal avenues. In some cases, it might be appropriate to bring a case to the International Criminal Court, as with the torture and mistreatment of detainees by British forces in Iraq. ECCHR also takes cases based on the principle of universal jurisdiction in third states like Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Sweden, filing complaints against those responsible for the US torture program in the so-called "war on terror," against the Bahraini Attorney General, and against senior officials within the Syrian intelligence services.

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