French judges have issued arrest warrants for Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian ruler, and six senior officials of his ousted regime, for killing and wounding a group of journalists, including the American Marie Colvin, in 2012, during the Syrian civil war.
Ms. Colvin, 56, a reporter for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, and Rémi Ochlik, 28, a French freelance photographer, were killed when artillery struck a building in Homs where journalists had set up a makeshift media center. Three others were wounded. Colleagues suspected that Syrian forces had located the journalists by tracing their satellite phone signals.
The judges of the French War Crimes Unit who investigated the attack found that the seven men named in the warrants were likely to be guilty of a war crime and a crime against humanity, according to the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, which is involved in the case. The warrants were issued on Aug. 22 but first revealed on Tuesday by the federation; the judges, themselves, have not made any public statement.
The French investigation revealed that the Syrian officials ordered the targeting of civilians during the brutal siege of the city of Homs, regarded as a rebel stronghold, and that there was a Syrian government policy to stop international journalists from covering the conflict, said Clémence Bectarte, a lawyer for the human rights group and for the parents of Mr. Ochlik.
“The judges had access to documents from the security services at the time ordering that journalists be followed and intercepted at checkpoints,” she said. Even so, some foreign reporters and photographers managed to slip into the city to cover the carnage and the destruction there.
Mr. al-Assad and his family fled to Russia last December, and the whereabouts of the six other accused officials are unknown, but under French law they can be tried in absentia.
Marie Colvin, an Intrepid War Correspondent
Ms. Colvin, who was interviewed live on CNN just hours before her death, had perhaps the highest international profile of the well over 100 journalists killed in almost 14 years of war in Syria. A great majority of those journalists were Syrian, while at least 15, including Mr. Ochlik and Ms. Colvin, were foreign, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
After the attack in Homs, which was widely reported at the time, fewer foreign journalists risked going to Syria, restricting the world’s view into the atrocities committed there.
Ms. Colvin, a native of New York, was an experienced, risk-taking chronicler of armed conflict, having covered wars in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Kosovo and elsewhere. In 2001 in Sri Lanka, she lost the use of her left eye to a rocket-propelled grenade, and wore an eye patch afterward. Her remarkable career has been recounted in multiple books and films, including the movie “A Private War,” in which she was portrayed by Rosamund Pike.
In 2019, Ms. Colvin’s family won a judgment of more than $300 million in a court in Washington, D.C., against the Syrian government for targeting and killing the journalist. The Assad regime had said she had been killed by an improvised explosive device, suggesting that rebels were responsible — a claim refuted by other journalists who survived the attack in Homs.
Wounded in the attack were Paul Conroy, a British photographer for The Sunday Times who worked with Ms. Colvin; a Syrian translator, Wael Omar, and a French freelance reporter who was on assignment for Le Figaro, Edith Bouvier.
French police have recently created a special unit in charge of tracking fugitives wanted by French courts, said Ms. Bectarte, the lawyer. In the case of Syria, French authorities have issued 21 arrest warrants for officials, now including three for Mr. Assad.
Most immediately, the arrest warrants constraint the travel of the accused, particularly in the European Union, whose members are bound by treaties to cooperate with each other in judicial cases. The warrants are also expected to be distributed by Interpol throughout the world, but some countries do not honor them.
The civil war killed more than 600,000 people, including almost 200,000 civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which closely tracks events there. In addition, the Assad regime’s ruthless security apparatus killed tens of thousands of activists, dissidents and journalists, many of them within its notorious prisons. Multiple mass graves have been discovered holding countless anonymous bodies.
France, with historic ties to Syria, has taken a special interest in the fate of the country, post-Assad. France ruled Syria under a League of Nations mandate from 1923 to 1946.
French warrants were also issued for one of Mr. al-Assad’s brothers, Maher al-Assad, a key figure and once the de facto commander of the Syrian Army’s 4th Division; Ali Ayoub, former chief of staff of the Syrian Army; Ali Mamlouk, former leader of Syrian intelligence services; Ghassan Bilal, chief of the security office of the 4th Division; Mohamed Dib Zaitoun, former chief of the General Security Directorate; and Rafik Mahmoud Shahadah, former head of security for the military and security committee in Homs.
Marlise Simons is a correspondent in the Paris bureau, focusing on international justice and war-crimes tribunals. In almost four decades at The New York Times, she has been based in France and Italy to report about Europe and previously covered Latin America from posts in Brazil and Mexico.
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