French judicial authorities have issued arrest warrants for former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and six other former senior officials over the killing of journalists in Homs in 2012, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) said on Tuesday.
“Investigative judges of the French War Crimes Division have issued arrest warrants for seven former senior Syrian officials, including ousted President Bashar al-Assad,” FIDH said in a statement.
Assad and six other officials are accused of complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity against French and international journalists Remi Ochlik, Edith Bouvier, Marie Colvin and Paul Conroy, as well as translator Wael al-Oma, who were killed or wounded in an attack on an informal press center in Homs in 2012.
“The issuance of these seven arrest warrants is a decisive step that paves the way for the trial in France for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Bashar al-Assad regime against Rémi Ochlik and his fellow journalists who were at the informal press center in Bab Amr in February 2012,” said Clemence Bectarte, a lawyer for FIDH.
Mazen Darwish, a lawyer and general director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), also said that the judicial investigation had established that the attack on the press center was part of “an explicit intention by the Syrian regime to target foreign journalists in order to limit media coverage of the crimes and force them to leave the city and the country.”
FIDH added that French authorities have so far issued 21 arrest warrants for senior Syrian officials, three of which are for Assad.
