Anwar Raslan spent the spring and summer of 2011 and most of 2012 in charge of interrogations at Branch 251 of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate, the unit responsible for the Damascus area. On January 13, 2022, the state security senate of the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz, in western Germany, found that he had been a co-perpetrator in what happened to the people held in the jail attached to his section during those months. At least 4,000 detainees passed through it and were tortured, the court held, and 27 of them died. It convicted the former colonel of a crime against humanity in the form of killing, torture, severe deprivation of liberty, rape and sexual coercion, concurrent with murder in 27 cases, together with a series of further offenses, and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Raslan had never laid hands on the prisoners himself, and the court accepted as much. Its finding was that he controlled the place where it happened. He set the goals of the interrogations, received the reports, was told when someone died, and kept the practice going. He was 58 when the sentence was read, a man who had defected from the government he served, joined the opposition in exile and been admitted to Germany as a refugee. He was tried there under the principle that certain crimes concern all states, wherever they are committed and whoever commits them. In March 2024 the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe made a small correction to the sexual-offense counts, dismissed the rest of his appeal and left the life sentence in place. The conviction is final.
Raslan came from Al-Houla, in central Syria, and studied law. By his own account, given to the court through his lawyers in May 2020, he applied to the police training program of the Interior Ministry in 1992, graduated as a lieutenant near the top of his year and, as one of the strongest graduates, was sent on to state security. He said he began at Branch 251 at the age of 32 and became head of its investigations in 2008. In the same statement he described himself as a man with more than 25 years in Syria's security services.
The court's findings, as summarized by the Federal Court of Justice, place him a rank higher still. Before the end of April 2011 he held the rank of colonel and two posts at once: deputy head of Branch 251 and head of its interrogation subdivision. He kept both throughout the period the court examined. Between five and ten interrogation officers reported to him, as did the director of the jail. As a commander with a quasi-military chain of authority, the court found, he had wide powers to give orders to everyone in his subdivision, and he used them. His responsibility covered the running of the jail, the treatment of the people held there and the conduct of the interrogations. He checked that his instructions were followed by visiting the cells regularly.
The jail sat inside a branch that the court and the prosecution also called the Al-Khatib branch, after its location in the Syrian capital. It took in people arrested in and around Damascus. In early 2011, after the protests of the Arab Spring reached Syria, those arrests multiplied.
The Koblenz judgment begins not with Raslan but with the state he served. The court found that by the end of April 2011 at the latest, the Syrian government was conducting a widespread and systematic attack on its own civilian population. As protests spread, a central crisis body answering directly to President Bashar al-Assad was set up to direct the response of all the security forces. Its decisions in April 2011, in the court's account, aimed to put down the protest movement at any price, to deter those who had demonstrated from going further and to frighten the population as a whole away from protest. The intelligence services carried those decisions out. Every day, real or suspected opponents of the government were arrested in large numbers and taken to the intelligence services' own jails, among them the jail of Branch 251. There they were held without any lawful process.
The court did not treat the violence inside those jails as the work of individual officers acting on their own. It found that it was part of a deliberate strategy meant to make the population compliant, and that the attack was both widespread, in its scale, and systematic, in its organization. That finding mattered for everything that followed. Under German law a killing, an act of torture or a deprivation of liberty becomes a crime against humanity only when it is committed as part of such an attack on a civilian population. The Syrian government has denied that it tortures prisoners or holds political prisoners. The trial took place while the war that followed those protests was still going on.
The period the court examined runs from April 29, 2011, to September 7, 2012. In that time, it found, at least 4,000 people were held in the jail attached to the interrogation subdivision of Branch 251, each of them for several days at least, and almost every one of them was taken to at least one interrogation in which officers tortured them. Twenty of those former detainees later joined the German proceedings as joint plaintiffs, a role German criminal procedure gives to people injured by the offenses on trial.
The judgment also set out the conditions in the jail as a whole, which the court described as degrading and inhumane in their own right. The court found that torture had become a structural part of how the interrogation subdivision worked. After the conflict began, the interrogators were given greater latitude, so that they could torture without specific orders, with the silent approval of their superiors. There was, on the court's findings, almost no interrogation in the branch without it.
Twenty-seven of the people held there died in that period as a result of the torture, the other mistreatment or the conditions of their detention. The court identified them as a number, and that number is the one on which the murder conviction rests. The indictment had put the number of deaths at no fewer than 58; at the close of the trial the prosecution spoke of at least 30. Not every death charged could be proven to the standard the court required, and the 27 deaths of which it was convinced are the ones that carry the murder conviction.
The court found that Raslan knew about the deaths. Torture and mistreatment were established practice, it held, and Raslan maintained that practice. He left the choice of means to the interrogators and the guards. He had a formal right to propose what should happen to each prisoner next, release, continued detention or transfer to another agency, and in most cases that proposal amounted in practice to his own decision. The use of torture and other violence, up to and including sexual abuse, was in the court's words both known to him and wanted by him, as a way of forcing statements and intimidating detainees. He accepted the deaths as the inevitable consequence of the abuse and of conditions he also knew about. That is the legal standard of conditional intent, and it was enough for murder.
He identified with the Syrian state, the court found, knew of the coordinated action of the security agencies against suspected opponents and approved of it, and saw his own work as an integral part of it. Keeping the government in power also mattered to him personally, because his status, his income and his social privileges depended on it. He knew there was no legal basis for the detentions, the interrogation methods or the conditions, and that all of it violated human rights.
At some point in 2012 Raslan left the General Intelligence Directorate and Syria. The court fixed his flight in December 2012. He reached Jordan, where an officer who had defected from the Syrian air force months earlier met him and helped him settle. That officer later described the escape as a defense witness in Koblenz and said Raslan had been afraid that he would be killed. On arrival Raslan was questioned by Jordanian intelligence, and he later handed over internal documents he had brought out of Syria.
In Jordan he became a visible member of the Syrian opposition. In 2014 he took part in the Geneva peace talks as a member of the opposition delegation, in an advisory team around the core negotiators. The same year he was admitted to Germany under the country's humanitarian admission program for Syrian refugees, which had been created in 2013 with 5,000 visas. The German foreign office knew him as an opposition figure. He was granted asylum. In his statement to the court he said that when he applied he had told the authorities that he came from the military, had shown them his military identity card and had said that many people were imprisoned in his branch.
He settled in Berlin. In February 2015 he walked into a Berlin police station and asked for protection. He believed he was being followed, perhaps by Syrian intelligence agents. In explaining who he was and why he might be in danger, he gave the officers an account of the violence he had seen at Branch 251, and that account marked him as a possible suspect. In a later letter to the Berlin police, he signed himself as a colonel.
Germany's Federal Public Prosecutor General had already opened a structural investigation into crimes committed in Syria in September 2011, a form of inquiry that gathers evidence about a conflict before any individual suspect has been identified. Investigators of the Federal Criminal Police Office began looking at Raslan in 2017. Over the next two years they took statements from around 70 witnesses, many of them Syrians who had found refuge in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. The Commission for International Justice and Accountability, a body that collects documents from the Syrian conflict, supplied two Branch 251 documents bearing Raslan's signature. In March 2019 his case was joined with that of a former junior member of Branch 251, Eyad A.
Eyad A. had come to Germany in 2018. He had served in Branch 251 from February 2010 and moved in July 2011 to Subdivision 40, a unit used to break up demonstrations, until he deserted in January 2012. He was first heard as a witness in the structural investigation, and what he told investigators, the Koblenz court later found, contributed substantially to the case against his former superior.
On February 7, 2019, an investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice issued a warrant for Raslan's arrest. He was arrested in Berlin on February 12, 2019, a few days after his 56th birthday, and remanded in custody. Eyad A., then 42, was arrested the same day in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In a coordinated operation, the Paris prosecutor's office had a third man from the same unit detained in France that day.
The Federal Public Prosecutor General filed the indictment before the state security senate of the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz in October 2019 and announced it on October 29. It charged Raslan with a crime against humanity, among other offenses, as the man responsible in a leading role for the torture of at least 4,000 people in the Branch 251 jail between late April 2011 and early September 2012, with at least 58 deaths and with rape and sexual coercion. He was not charged with abusing anyone himself; the case was that he answered for what happened in the interrogations and the cells as the supervisor in direct command. Eyad A. was charged with aiding and abetting a crime against humanity in connection with at least 30 people delivered to the same jail.
The case went to Koblenz rather than Berlin for a procedural reason. Eyad A. had lived in Zweibrücken, in Rhineland-Palatinate, and had been arrested there, and the rules of German criminal procedure on joined cases gave the Koblenz court jurisdiction over both men.
The trial opened on April 23, 2020, before the 1st Criminal Senate of the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz, sitting as a state security senate of five judges. Germany's federal prosecutors called it the first criminal trial anywhere on state torture in Syria. Raslan came into the courtroom without covering his face. Eyad A. arrived with his face hidden.
On May 18, 2020, the fifth day of hearings, Raslan's lawyers read a statement in his name that took nearly two hours. When it was finished the presiding judge asked whether it was his statement, and he answered yes. He did not deny that torture took place in Syria. He denied that he had ever beaten or tortured anyone, denied that he had ordered torture and denied that he had supported it. He said that after the uprising began his superiors grew suspicious of him, in part because he was a Sunni Muslim and in part because he had released many prisoners, that his responsibilities were taken away, and that from then on he wrote reports and conducted no more interrogations. He said he had helped detainees, and that he had become a refugee because he did not accept what was happening in Syria. He named about 25 witnesses he wanted the court to hear. Through the rest of the trial he did not speak.
The evidence ran for more than a year and a half. The court heard more than 80 witnesses, among them former detainees, former Syrian government employees who had defected, German police investigators and experts on Syria. Several witnesses identified Raslan in the courtroom. Several others canceled their appearances out of fear for their own safety and that of their families. The court also examined a selection of the photographs known as the Caesar files, which it accepted as the work of a former Syrian military photographer and which an expert assessed for the court, together with documents and the reports of international and human rights organizations, including those of the independent international commission of inquiry on Syria set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council.
In February 2021 the court separated the case of Eyad A. and decided it first. On February 24, 2021, after ten months of trial, it convicted him of aiding and abetting a crime against humanity in the form of torture and severe deprivation of liberty and sentenced him to four years and six months in prison. The court treated his help in uncovering the offenses of his former superior as a mitigating factor under the German provision on cooperating offenders. The Federal Court of Justice rejected his appeal on April 20, 2022 (3 StR 367/21), and his conviction became final.
Raslan's trial went on. The prosecution gave its closing argument on December 1 and 2, 2021, and asked for life imprisonment with a finding that his guilt was particularly severe, a finding that would almost rule out release after 15 years. Lawyers for the joint plaintiffs followed on December 8 and 15, and four of the survivors who had joined the case spoke for themselves. On January 6, 2022, the defense asked for acquittal. It argued that Raslan had been stripped of real authority once his superiors doubted his loyalty, that he was not among those most responsible, and that he could not be held to account in any case because leaving his post or turning against the government would have put his life and his family's lives at risk, which in German law is the defense of excusing necessity. A further written statement from Raslan was read out by his interpreter.
The court announced its judgment on January 13, 2022, the final day of a trial that had run for more than a hundred days of hearings. The presiding judge spent hours giving the reasons, with interpreters translating into Arabic.
The senate convicted Raslan, then 58, of a crime against humanity in the form of killing, torture, severe deprivation of liberty, rape and sexual coercion, concurrent with murder in 27 cases, dangerous bodily harm in 25 cases, particularly serious rape, sexual coercion in two cases, deprivation of liberty lasting more than a week in 14 cases, hostage-taking in two cases and sexual abuse of prisoners in three cases. It sentenced him to life imprisonment.
It held that he had been a co-perpetrator. He had not carried out the acts himself, but as head of the interrogation section he had supervised and decisively shaped what happened in the jail, so that he controlled the offenses, and they were attributed to him through his power to decide and command. For the 27 deaths it found the element of base motives that turns a killing into murder in German law. Raslan, the court held, had wanted to fight peaceful political opponents to the point of their physical destruction in order to prevent the fall of a totalitarian government, and at the same time to keep his respected social position as a colonel of the General Intelligence Directorate and the privileges that came with it.
The court rejected the defense of excusing necessity. Raslan, it found, could have left Syria considerably earlier than he did, and given the gravity of the crimes it had been reasonable to expect him to withdraw from them even at high personal risk. It also rejected his account of having lost his authority in mid-2011, pointing among other things to a witness released through his intervention, to witnesses he had questioned as late as 2012, and to privileges he kept until he left. It found that he had defected late and for pragmatic rather than ethical reasons.
German law makes life imprisonment mandatory both for murder and for a killing under the crime-against-humanity provision, and the court imposed it. It declined, after weighing the whole case, to find that his guilt was particularly severe. It took into account that the offenses were ten years in the past, that he had not used violence with his own hands, that his intent as to the deaths was only conditional and that he had broken with the Syrian government. The effect is that after 15 years a court will consider whether the rest of the life sentence can be suspended on probation.
Raslan's lawyers said at once that they would appeal to the Federal Court of Justice. One of them told reporters that his client had been convicted as a stand-in for the government.
The appeal went to the 3rd Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice, which hears appeals in state security cases from the whole of Germany. Raslan challenged both the procedure and the application of the law. The senate decided the case by unanimous order on March 20, 2024 (3 StR 454/22).
It amended the conviction in three respects, all of them concerning offenses under the ordinary Criminal Code that the trial court had added to the crime against humanity. Under the version of the law in force at the time, rape could be committed only by the person who personally performed the act. Raslan was not present, so in place of particularly serious rape he was guilty of particularly serious sexual coercion. For the same reason, in place of sexual abuse of prisoners in three cases he was guilty of aiding and abetting sexual abuse of prisoners, and only in two cases, because prosecution of the third had become time-barred under the German limitation rules. The separate conviction for sexual coercion in two cases fell away, because those acts were already fully covered by the crime against humanity of sexual violence. The rest of the appeal was dismissed as unfounded. None of the changes affected the sentence, since the crime against humanity and murder both carry life imprisonment as the only penalty. Raslan was ordered to pay the costs of the appeal and the necessary expenses of the joint plaintiffs.
The order also settled two questions of wider weight for the case. The defense had argued that the court should not have read out the reports of the United Nations commission of inquiry on Syria in place of hearing witnesses. The senate held that the commission counts as a public authority for the purposes of the German rule that allows such official records to be read into evidence, so the reports were properly used. And it confirmed that Raslan had no immunity as a former official of a foreign state. The general immunity of state officials, the senate held, ends at crimes under international law, whatever the rank or status of the person accused. The decision was made public in August 2024. With it, the Koblenz judgment became final.
The case rested on the German Code of Crimes against International Law, the statute that brought the offenses of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court into German law. Its first section applies the statute to crimes against humanity even when the act was committed abroad and has no connection with Germany. The Koblenz court relied on that section, the principle of universal jurisdiction, to try a Syrian national for acts committed against Syrians in Damascus. Section 7 defines a crime against humanity as one of a list of acts, among them killing, torture, sexual violence and severe deprivation of liberty, committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. Killing under section 7 carries life imprisonment, as does murder under section 211 of the Criminal Code.
A German life sentence does not fix a release date. Unless the trial court finds that the guilt is particularly severe, the sentencing court examines after 15 years whether the remainder can be suspended. The Koblenz court's refusal of that finding, against the prosecution's request, is the reason Raslan's case will come up for that review.
Two features of the procedure followed from the German rules on joint plaintiffs. Survivors who joined the case had rights of their own at trial and on appeal, and they did not agree to the prosecution's decision, when it filed the indictment, to limit the charges to the crime against humanity. Because they did not consent, the ordinary sexual offenses against them remained part of the case, and they were the counts the Federal Court of Justice later corrected.
The number of deaths was the main point on which the charge and the judgment parted. The indictment counted at least 58; the court was satisfied of 27, and only those 27 carry the murder conviction. The other deaths alleged were charged but not proven.
Raslan's account of his own role was rejected. He told the court that he had lost his authority within months of the uprising, that he conducted no interrogations afterward and that he helped detainees. The court found that he kept both his posts and his control over the jail throughout the period, while accepting that he had sometimes treated detainees well and had helped some of them leave.
The timing of his defection remained contested. The court fixed his flight from Syria in December 2012. Other accounts at the trial placed his break with the intelligence service earlier in 2012, and a defense witness placed the escape to Jordan about half a year after his own defection in the summer of 2012.
The judgment of the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz has been final since March 20, 2024. As of May 2026 Raslan remained in custody in Germany, serving the life sentence. Eyad A., his former subordinate, was convicted separately and his sentence has also been final since April 2022.
1992: Raslan applies to the Syrian Interior Ministry's police training program, by his own account.
2008: Becomes head of investigations at Branch 251, by his own account.
April 29, 2011: Start of the period in which the court found a widespread and systematic attack and the offenses at Branch 251.
September 2011: Germany's Federal Public Prosecutor General opens a structural investigation into crimes in Syria.
September 7, 2012: End of the period of the offenses found by the court.
December 2012: Raslan leaves Syria for Jordan, on the court's finding.
2014: Takes part in the Geneva peace talks with the opposition delegation; admitted to Germany and granted asylum.
February 2015: Asks Berlin police for protection and describes his former work.
2017: Federal Criminal Police Office begins investigating him.
February 7, 2019: Arrest warrant issued by an investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice.
February 12, 2019: Arrested in Berlin; Eyad A. arrested in Rhineland-Palatinate.
October 29, 2019: Indictment before the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz announced.
April 23, 2020: Trial opens in Koblenz.
May 18, 2020: Raslan's statement denying torture is read in court.
February 24, 2021: Eyad A. convicted of aiding and abetting a crime against humanity; four years and six months.
December 1 and 2, 2021: Prosecution closing argument.
January 6, 2022: Defense asks for acquittal.
January 13, 2022: Raslan convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
April 20, 2022: Federal Court of Justice rejects Eyad A.'s appeal.
March 20, 2024: Federal Court of Justice amends the sexual-offense counts, dismisses the rest of Raslan's appeal; conviction final.
August 2024: The appeal decision is made public.