THE HAGUE – The court in The Hague will hear the criminal case against a 35-year-old Syrian suspected of war crimes on Thursday. According to the Public Prosecution Service, he was involved in two violent arrests in Syria. Mustafa A. was arrested in Kerkrade in May last year. According to the justice department, this is the first time that someone has been arrested in the Netherlands who allegedly sided with the Syrian regime.
According to the Public Prosecution Service, A. was involved in two violent arrests of civilians in January 2013, who were later tortured in a prison of the intelligence service of the Syrian Air Force.
A. came to the Netherlands in 2020 and applied for asylum here. At the end of that year, the police’s National Investigation Service received tips that the man might have been a member of a prominent Syrian militia that fought alongside the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.
During an earlier court hearing, A. denied all allegations. He did indicate that he had joined Liwa al-Quds, a militia that works closely with the Syrian intelligence services and the Russian armed forces, but that was only to defend the camp in which he was born and raised. This concerns the Palestinian refugee camp al-Nayrab, near the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
