France issues warrants for top Syrian commanders

PARIS: French investigators have issued international arrest warrants for four senior Syrian army officers believed to have ordered a 2017 bombardment that killed a French-Syrian civilian, a source familiar with the case told AFP on Thursday.

Case documents seen by AFP show that one of the men is Fahd Jassem al-Freij, who was serving as defence minister at the time and is accused of “complicity in a deliberate attack against the civilian population... constituting a war crime”.

“These international arrest warrants, the first ever issued for war crimes against senior officials in the Syrian regime, show that... the fight for justice continues,” said Clemence Bectarte, a lawyer representing co-plaintiffs in the case. Salah Abou Nabout, a 59-year-old French-Syrian former teacher, was killed in the southern city of Daraa on June 7, 2017.

His France-based son Omar Abu Nabout and aid group the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) say that a Syrian air force helicopter supported by Russian forces dropped a barrel bomb on the three-storey block where Salah lived. The Paris criminal court´s crimes against humanity unit opened an investigation in 2018 after Omar filed a complaint.