France issued on Monday international arrest warrants against three senior Syrian intelligence and regime officials for their involvement in war crimes.
A defense lawyer and a judicial source revealed that security chief Ali Mamlouk was among the officials targeted by the warrant.
Jamil Hassan, the head of Airforce Intelligence who is already the subject of a German warrant, is the other official, the sources said.
Another senior Airforce Intelligence official, Abdel Salam Mahmoud, was also named in the French order.
The warrants stem from a long-running case involving two French-Syrian nationals who were arrested in Syria in November 2013 and had disappeared since.
Damascus confirmed in August 2018 that the father and son, Mazen and Patrick Abdelkader Dabbagh, were dead, the sources said. They include a lawyer for their family, Clemence Bectarte, who said the warrants were issued in mid-October.
Prosecutors in Paris had already opened a probe into the pair’s disappearance, starting with a preliminary investigation in 2015, and had found that their house in Damascus had been raided by intelligence officials, the judicial source said.
The French warrants bring charges including collusion in torture, forced disappearances, crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Syrian regime officials.
