Until Friday, three high-ranking Syrian officials will be tried in absentia for the deaths of two Franco-Syrians.

Ali Mamlouk, former head of the national security service, the highest intelligence authority in Syria, Jamil Hassan, former director of the Air Force intelligence services, and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, former director of the investigation branch of these services, are accused of complicity in crimes against humanity and complicity in war crimes.

According to the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), they are "the highest-ranking regime officials ever charged in court since the start of the Syrian revolution in March 2011".

Trials have already been held on the crimes of the regime in several parts of Europe, particularly in Germany. However, the defendants were of a lower level of responsibility.

In this case, the defendants are suspected of having played a role, to varying degrees, in the enforced disappearance and death of Mazzen Dabbagh and his son Patrick, two Franco-Syrians who lived in Damascus.

The father was a senior education adviser at the French School and the son was a student at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in the Syrian capital.

Both were said by agents who claimed to belong to the intelligence services of the Army and the Air Force.

According to Mazzen Dabbagh's brother-in-law, who was arrested at the same time as him but released two days later, the two men were transferred to Mezzeh airport, the headquarters of a detention center denounced as one of the regime's worst torture centers.

After that, they never gave any sign of life, until they were declared dead in August 2018.

According to the death certificates given to the family, Patrick died on January 21, 2014, and Mazzen on November 25, 2017.

In their indictment, the investigating judges considered it "sufficiently established" that the two men "suffered, like thousands of detainees by the intelligence services of the Army and the Air Force, torture such that they died".

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