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Contains distressing content.
24 Feb 2021

2021: Former Syrian official convicted by German court in first case of its kind

International Editor

Warning: this report contains graphic images of torture that some viewers will find disturbing.

It’s almost ten years exactly since the Arab Spring came to Syria, triggering a long winter of brutal repression by the Assad regime.

Today, a German court found a former member of President Assad’s secret police guilty of facilitating the torture of prisoners.

Eyad Al-Gharib had claimed asylum in Germany before being arrested in 2019.

Campaigners hope his trial will be the first of many to bring justice for some of the hundreds of thousands who have gone missing in the Syrian regime’s notorious prisons.