The German Federal Court has dismissed the appeal of a former Syrian secret police officer, Anwar Raslan, who was convicted of overseeing detainee abuse at a prison in Syria. Raslan was found guilty of crimes against humanity in January 2022 by a court in Koblenz, Germany, and was sentenced to life in prison. The court ruled that Raslan was responsible for interrogations at a facility in Douma, where opposition protesters were detained and subjected to systematic and brutal torture between April 2011 and September 2012, leading to the deaths of at least 58 individuals.
Prosecutors in Germany alleged that Raslan supervised the torture of over 4,000 prisoners, with evidence linking him to 27 deaths. The Federal Court of Justice stated that there were no legal errors in the case that would benefit the accused and rejected any procedural objections put forth. Anwar Raslan’s conviction followed that of Eyad al-Gharib, a junior officer who was convicted in February 2021 as an accessory to crimes against humanity and received a 4 1/2-year prison sentence from the Koblenz court.
Both Raslan and al-Gharib were arrested in Germany in 2019 after seeking asylum in the country. The federal court also dismissed al-Gharib’s appeal in 2022, upholding his original conviction.
