Austrian court convicts former Syrian intelligence chief of torture
A court in Vienna on July 6 convicted Khaled al-Halabi , a 63-year-old former brigadier general who led Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate in Raqqa from 2011 to 2013, and sentenced him to eight years in prison on charges including torture. A second defendant, former police lieutenant colonel Musab Abu Rukbah, 54, received the same sentence.
During the month-long trial, more than a dozen victims testified that they were beaten, electrocuted, or doused in hot and cold water while detained under al-Halabi’s command. He denied involvement, but the court found he knew of and bore responsibility for the abuse of prisoners in his custody.
The case is one of only a handful in which a European country has asserted jurisdiction over crimes committed by Syrian state agents, relying on the principle of universal jurisdiction for grave international offenses. With Bashar al-Assad ousted and Syria’s own accountability processes still forming, such foreign prosecutions remain one of the few available routes to convictions for abuses committed during the civil war.