Austrian court convicts two former Syrian officers in torture case

Verdict in Vienna

An Austrian court on Monday found two former Syrian security officials guilty of crimes including torture, aggravated bodily harm and sexual assault for atrocities carried out between 2011 and 2013. Khaled al-Halabi, who led the General Intelligence Directorate in Raqqa during that period, was sentenced to eight years in prison after testimony from more than a dozen victims describing abuses such as kicks to the head, electric shocks to the genitals and water-based torture. Musab Abu Rukbah, a criminal police investigator known to prosecutors as the "Angel of Death," was convicted on related charges though not of torture. The court concluded the men sometimes ordered, sometimes failed to prevent, and in some cases directly carried out the abuses. Both defendants, who came to Austria in 2015 and had been living there as refugees under a reportedly secret Israeli-Austrian arrangement, pleaded not guilty; al-Halabi claimed he had been acting under orders, a defense prosecutors compared to the discredited Nuremberg plea. The verdict can be appealed.

Context and legal significance

The case was prosecuted in Austria under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows national courts to try serious international crimes regardless of where they occurred. It is one of several European prosecutions linked to alleged abuses from Syria's long civil war. The court noted the events took place in Raqqa, a city that later became a focal point of the conflict—falling to opposition groups in 2013, becoming the de facto capital for the so-called Islamic State in 2014, and changing hands again after 2017 as various forces contested the area. The Vienna ruling underscores growing efforts by European judiciaries to hold alleged perpetrators of Syria-era crimes to account, as reported by Deutsche Welle

This story has also been reported by: New York Times, Al-Monitor, SANA