German prosecutors on Wednesday arrested four suspected members of a Syrian militia and one suspected member of the Syrian secret service.
The detainees are suspected of killing and attempting to kill civilians, which amounts to crimes against humanity and war crimes. Four of them are also accused of torture.
The four alleged militia members are said to have joined the Free Palestine Movement (FPM) in Syria at the latest in 2011, which governed a district in the capital Damascus on behalf of the Syrian regime, the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
The Yarmouk neighborhood was established in July 2013 as a Palestinian refugee camp and was completely sealed off.
Those arrested are said to have taken part in the violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration against the Syrian government in 2012. At least six people were killed.
They also allegedly physically abused civilians at checkpoints. “The victims were hit on the head with fists and rifle butts or kicked,” Germany’s top prosecutor continued.
The arrests were made on Wednesday in Berlin, Frankenthal in the southern German region of Palatinate and in the north, near Boizenburg in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
The Federal Criminal Police Office and Europol also supported the criminal investigation offices of Berlin, Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia.
In the western city of Essen, the homes of another fugitive suspect were also searched.
At the same time, three more people were arrested in Sweden on suspicion of crimes against international law committed in Syria in 2012, the Swedish Public Prosecutor’s Office announced.
