‘INDUSTRIAL SCALE’

Germany Convicts Syrian Spy for Arresting Protesters Tortured by Assad’s Regime

During his trial, prosecutors described Eyad al-Gharib as one of the “cogs in the wheel” that allowed Assad’s mass torture program to operate.

Germany has sentenced an ex-Syrian intelligence officer to more than four years in prison for his complicity in President Bashar al-Assad’s crimes against humanity, BBC News reports. Eyad al-Gharib, 44, was accused of arresting protesters during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising against Assad—and dozens of those protesters were then tortured by Assad’s regime. Eyad al-Gharib fled Syria’s civil war in 2013 and claimed asylum in Germany, where he was arrested six years later. During his trial, prosecutors described him as one of the “cogs in the wheel” that allowed Assad’s mass torture program to operate. He charged with bringing at least 30 protesters to a prison in Damascus where they were tortured. Prosecutors described killing and torture on an “almost industrial scale,”at the prison, and witnesses said they were beaten, raped, and hung from the ceiling. Human-rights monitors have put the regime’s torture death toll at more than 15,000.