A Dutch court on Friday sentenced a Syrian man to 20 years in prison for his affiliation with a group belonging to an opposing faction that executed a government officer loyal to the regime in 2012. The accused, identified by Dutch media as "Ahmad," 49 years old, was convicted under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows countries to prosecute individuals for genocide and war crimes regardless of where they occurred or the nationalities of the victims.
The defendant was a leader of a small group in the Syrian town of Muhsen in Deir ez-Zor at the time when the unarmed captive officer, who had surrendered in 2012, was executed. The court in The Hague deemed this act a war crime. The court stated that the accused "also participated in shooting the victim."
Despite the prosecution's request for a 27-year sentence, arguing that he was the leader of a "terrorist organization," the judges did not find the evidence strong enough to convict him on that charge.
According to the official NOS radio, "Ahmad" is a former soldier from the Syrian army who fled his service and led a group linked to the terrorist organization Jabhat al-Nusra. It added that he managed to seek asylum in the Netherlands in 2013, where he was arrested six years later in a city in the Zeeland region, where he lived with his wife and children.
This ruling on Friday is the first in the Netherlands for a war crime committed in Syria, although another Syrian had previously been sentenced to prison for belonging to a "terrorist" organization and appearing in a video among a group of corpses.
