PARIS: French magistrates this summer issued a new arrest warrant against ousted Syrian president Bashar Assad over deadly chemical attacks in 2013, a judicial source said on Thursday.
This means France has now put out three separate arrest warrants against the former dictator exiled in Russia, who ruled Syria from 2000 until he was toppled last year after more than 14 years of devastating civil war.
French investigators have since 2021 been looking into suspected Syrian government chemical attacks on Adra and Douma outside Damascus on August 4-5, 2013, and in Eastern Ghouta on August 21.
Around 450 people were hurt in the first attack, while American intelligence says over 1,000 were killed with sarin nerve gas in East Ghouta, a suburb of Syrian capital Damascus.
Magistrates had in 2023 issued an arrest warrant in the chemical attacks case while Assad was still president, but the country’s highest court in July annulled it over it being ordered while his presidential immunity still applied.
Syrians gather near a vehicle of the United Nations arms experts as they inspect a site suspected of being hit by a deadly chemical weapons attack on August 28, 2013 in the Eastern Ghouta area on the northeastern outskirts of Damascus. (AFP)
This new arrest warrant issued after his fall from power replaces the previous one. It accuses him of complicity in crimes against humanity and complicity in war crimes in the chemical attack case.
Also in the same case, magistrates issued a warrant against Talal Makhlouf, the former commander of the Syrian Republican Guard’s 105th Brigade, the judicial source said.
Assad and his family fled to Russia, according to Russian authorities, after Islamist-led fighters seized power on December 8.
Two other French warrants are already out for Assad’s arrest.
One was issued in January for suspected complicity in war crimes for a bombing in the Syrian city of Daraa in 2017 whose victims included a French-Syrian civilian.
And another was issued in August over the bombardment of a press center in the rebel-held city in 2012 that killed two journalists.
Marie Colvin, 56, an American working for The Sunday Times of Britain, and French photographer Remi Ochlik, 28, were killed on February 22, 2012 by the explosion in the eastern city of Homs, which is being investigated by the French judiciary as a potential crime against humanity as well as a war crime.
Ahead of Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa visiting Russia last week, a Syrian government official told AFP that the new president would ask President Vladimir Putin to hand over Assad.
But after the meeting neither Sharaa nor Putin publicly mentioned extraditing Assad, who Russia says it is protecting on “humanitarian grounds.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed early last week that the ousted Syrian leader was still living in Moscow.
The Syrian civil war, which erupted in 2011 with Assad’s brutal repression of anti-government protests, killed over half a million people.
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