International Desk: A former Syrian general and a former senior police officer went on trial in Vienna on Monday, accused of involvement in the torture of opponents under the regime of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Austrian state prosecutors said in a statement that the defendants were accused of repeatedly “ordering torture of members of the protest movement or failing to stop it.
One of the defendants was a former brigadier general in Syria’s intelligence service and the other was the former head of the local criminal investigation department.
According to the charges, they committed the crimes in the Syrian city of Raqqa between April 2011 and March 2013. Under Austrian law, the prosecution did not release the names of the defendants until the court’s final verdict was announced.
However, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard named the intelligence officer as Brigadier General Khaled al-Halabi. In addition, the APA news agency reported that he has been in pre-trial detention since the end of 2024.
The New York Times reported in November that Khaled al-Halabi was named and that his co-defendant was Lieutenant Colonel Musab Abu Rukba.
All this information was reported by their lawyer. (AFP reported.)
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