An Austrian court on Monday sentenced two former high-ranking Syrian security officials in the ousted government of Bashar al-Assad to eight years in prison each after finding them guilty of maltreatment of government opponents.<\/p>\n
The Vienna court found that the former intelligence service general and the former police officer had carried out or ordered attacks in some cases, and failed to prevent others.<\/p>\n
The former general was convicted of torture, causing grievous bodily harm, serious coercion and sexual abuse, and the former police officer of the same crimes, with the exception of torture.<\/p>\n
The men denied the charges, and the convictions are open to appeal.<\/p>\n
The charges centred on the abuse of 21 government critics, with the crimes perpetrated in al-Raqqa in north-eastern Syria between 2011 and 2013.<\/p>\n
Some of the victims detailed their suffering to the court, which found that the accused had kicked their victims in the face, applied shocks to their genitals and used water torture. The victims suffer long-term psychological and other health problems.<\/p>\n
The former general cast doubt on the credibility of the witnesses and said he was obeying orders. The prosecutor drew a comparison with the trials of Nazi criminals.<\/p>\n
The former general came to Austria in 2015 as part of an agreement between Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence agency and the Austrian domestic intelligence agency, being granted asylum instead of being prosecuted.<\/p>\n
The former policeman also came to Austria as a refugee.<\/p>\n
The judge in the trial said that, while Austrian courts did not in general prosecute crimes in Syria, they were competent to try cases of state-organized torture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Austrian court on Monday sentenced two former high-ranking Syrian security officials in the ousted government of Bashar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[30],"tags":[12477,57429,95,55876,46218,57430,57428,57427],"class_list":["post-192934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-syria","tag-austria","tag-austrian-court","tag-syria","tag-syrian-opposition","tag-torture-trial","tag-vienna-court","tag-vienna-regional-court","tag-water-torture"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116874022897588709","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}