Former intelligence officer Eyad al-Gharib, 44, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison by a court in the German city of Koblenz for aiding crimes against humanity.
Gharib was convicted of escorting the transport of 30 detained protesters despite knowing about the systematic torture in the prison to which the detainees were sent, prosecutors said. The protesters are said to have been beaten on their way to prison.
Both Raslan and Gharib defected from the regime in late 2012.
Raslan, a senior former intelligence officer, is still on trial. He is accused of supervising the torture of at least 4,000 prisoners during the uprising in Syria. At least 58 of the prisoners died. Rape and sexual assault would have taken place in at least one case.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has repeatedly been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity over the course of the country’s nearly decade-long war. But attempts to establish an international tribunal were hampered by Russian and Chinese vetoes in the United Nations Security Council.
Syrian officials have repeatedly denied the allegations, insisting that they target terrorists and not peaceful protesters.
“Today is an exceptional day in the life of Syrians,” Amer Matar, a 33-year-old Syrian man who said he was being tortured by Raslan, told CNN. “This is a very important message to us as Syrians that justice can really be achieved, even in a very distant place like Germany, even if it is partial, and to specific people.”
The Commission on International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), investigators who provided documentary evidence used by the Prosecution, called Tuesday’s verdict “historic.”
“This is a historic verdict,” CIJA Director Nerma Jelacic told CNN. Not only because it is the first to convict an official of the Syrian regime for crimes against humanity, but also because it recognizes that his crimes were part of a widespread and systematic attack orchestrated by the highest organs of the Assad regime .
“This is just the first of many other trials and studies that we support,” Jelacic added. “It has been nearly 10 years since the Eyad A. [al-Gharib] was convicted of being committed in those early days of the uprising when the regime came down harshly on naked armed protesters. ”
Since 2012, CIJA has been collecting evidence of the Syrian government’s alleged crimes from investigators known as “document hunters”. These are Syrians who have been recruited and trained by former war crimes investigators and lawyers to smuggle thousands of government documents out of Syrian war zones.
Human rights group Amnesty International urged more countries to follow Germany’s example. “We call on more states to follow Germany’s example by investigating and prosecuting persons suspected of committing war crimes or other crimes under international law in Syria through their national courts under the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction'”, said Lynn Maalouf, the deputy director of the organization. for the Middle East and North Africa.
Syrian human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, who is considered one of the driving forces behind the Koblenz trial, called the verdict “ a message to all criminals who continue to commit the most heinous crimes in Syria and to remind them that the time for impunity has come. passed, and there is no safe place to flee to. ”
Jomana Karadsheh and Eyad Kourdi from CNN contributed to this report.