Austrian court convicts two ex-Syrian officials over Raqqa torture

Convictions in Vienna

An Austrian court has convicted two former Syrian security officials linked to Bashar al-Assad's regime for crimes against opponents committed in Raqqa between 2011 and 2013. Khaled al-Halabi, who led the General Intelligence Directorate in Raqqa during that period, was sentenced to eight years after the court found him guilty of torture, aggravated bodily harm and sexual assault against 21 victims based on testimony from more than a dozen survivors. Musab Abu Rukbah, a criminal police investigator, was also convicted on related charges (though not the specific torture counts). Witnesses described severe abuses including blows to the head, electric shocks to genitals and water-based torture; the court said the two men sometimes ordered, sometimes failed to prevent, and at times personally carried out the abuses. Both defendants, who fled to Austria in 2015 under a secret intelligence transfer and lived there as refugees, pleaded not guilty and can appeal the verdict. Prosecutors rejected al-Halabi’s claim that he was only following orders, likening it to the discredited Nuremberg defense.

Wider context

The case was prosecuted under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows courts to try certain international crimes regardless of where they occurred. It is one of several European trials addressing alleged atrocities from Syria’s civil war that began in the wake of the Arab Spring. The convictions relate to abuses in Raqqa, a city that fell from government control in 2013, later became the de facto headquarters of the so-called Islamic State, and suffered heavy destruction before Kurdish-led forces took it back in 2017; the city’s governance remained contested in subsequent years. as reported by Deutsche Welle