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Hannah El-Hitami

Germany - Correspondent

Sedra Alshehabi stands with a placard with the picture of her father Ali and a text reading 'First step but my father and 130000 are still in jail' after the verdict in the trail of Syrian defendant Eyad al-Gharib
1 March 2021 by Hannah El-Hitami
Germany: Lessons from the first conviction of an agent of the Syrian regime On February 24 Eyad al-Gharib was the first Syrian regime official to be convicted by a German court for aiding and abetting the torture and detention of protesters in 2011. The minor role the defendant played in those crimes is m [...]
5 February 2021 by Hannah El-Hitami
Syrian and Yazidi trials: why victims’ lawyers want sexual violence considered Two landmark trials in Germany have been dealing with crimes against humanity and genocide allegedly committed in Syria and Iraq. So far, they have not focused on sexual and gender-based violence. Civil party lawyers in both Koble [...]
26 November 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
Syrian trial in Germany: The orders that came from the very top In the Al-Khatib trial against two former secret service officers from Syria, a witness has provided confidential documents issued by the Syrian regime. They would prove that crimes were ordered from the highest government level – [...]
12 November 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
Syrian torture trial: the “Caesar” files in court for the first time Last week in Koblenz, the renowned “Caesar” files were used as evidence in a court of law, for the first time. A forensic expert testified in the Al-Khatib trial, after having analysed the dead bodies in more than 50,000 photos. H [...]
29 October 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
The Yazidi trial in Germany: How to prove genocide in a single case? Little attention has been paid to a trial in Germany that could yet be the first to recognize as genocide the crime committed by Daesh against Iraq’s Yazidis. With one eyewitness, no dead body and a previous conviction in Iraq, th [...]
15 September 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
Syria: a spotlight on a bureaucracy of mass killings A Syrian government employee has testified anonymously, last week in the Al-Khatib trial in Koblenz (Germany), where two former secret service officers stand accused of crimes against humanity. He described vast mass graves, and d [...]
1 September 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
The man who brought Raslan to Germany In the Koblenz trial on Syrian state torture, the former secret service officer Anwar Raslan is accused of crimes against humanity. In 2014, he had arrived in Germany with the help of Riad Seif, one of Syria’s most prominent oppos [...]
27 July 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
Syrian torture trial in Germany: Insiders without protection In the Koblenz trial on Syrian state torture, the first insider witnesses have appeared before the German judges. Two former secret service civil servants had given incriminating testimonies to the police, but in court they were m [...]
19 June 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
Syria: the man in Raslan’s shadow - was he just following orders? Eyad Al-Gharib is the less known defendant in the first trial dealing with Syrian state torture that opened in April in Germany. As a low-ranking member of the intelligence service, he is accused of complicity in crimes against hu [...]
21 May 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
The Raslan trial in Germany: “I did not order torture or support it” On May 18, former Syrian intelligence senior officer Anwar Raslan gave his version of how he worked when he was in charge of General Secret Service’s Branch 251 in Damascus, Syria’s capital city, prior to 2011. He rejected all all [...]
4 May 2020 by Hannah El-Hitami
They felt too safe: how two Syrian agents ended up on trial in Germany After a week of hearings in Koblenz (Germany), the first historic trial to deal with state torture in Syria provided insight on how two refugees – a former chief at the General Intelligence Directorate in Damascus and a distant su [...]