French judges have issued arrest warrants for former Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad and six top aides for the killing and wounding of a group of journalists during the Syrian civil war in 2012.
Among those caught in the artillery strike in Homs were American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik. Three other journalists were wounded in the strike on the building they had been using as a media center. Colvin was a reporter for British newspaper The Sunday Times and Ochlik was a freelance photographer.
The French investigation found that the Syrian government had a policy to stop international journalists from covering the 14-year-long civil war. Colvin, Ochlik and the other wounded reporters’ colleagues suspected their media center was discovered and targeted by tracing their satellite phones.
“The judges had access to documents from the security services at the time ordering that journalists be followed and intercepted at checkpoints,” Clémence Bectarte, a lawyer for International Federation for Human Rights and for the parents of Ochlik, said according to The New York Times.
The judges of the French War Crimes Unit who spearheaded the investigation into the attack found that Assad and his aides were likely to be guilty of a war crime and a crime against humanity for the targeting of the journalists.
Colvin was a veteran war correspondent who ranked among the most prominent of the over 100 journalists and reporters killed while covering the war in Syria. She spoke to CNN’s Anderson Cooper the day before the artillery strike that took her life, explaining away the Syrian government’s claims that they were only attacking terrorists in the city.
“There are no military targets here,” she told Cooper the day before she was killed. “It’s a complete and utter lie. The Syrian Army is basically shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”
Colvin, a New York native, was a famed war correspondent who reported from conflict zones including Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Kosovo. She was left blind in one eye while covering the war in Sri Lanka in 2001 after she was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. Her illustrious career was chronicled in the 2018 film “A Private War” where she was portrayed by Rosamund Pike.
Along with the deaths of Colvin and Ochlik, several were wounded in the attack including Paul Conroy, a British photographer for The Sunday Times, Syrian translator, Wael Omar and a French freelance reporter who was on assignment for Le Figaro, Edith Bouvier.
al-Assad and his family fled to Russia last December, while the whereabouts of the six other accused officials remain unknown. Under French law, however, they can still be tried in absentia.
