It has been a year since Zaman al-Wasl published an exclusive report revealing the crimes of Mouwafak al-Al-Dawah, the Syrian-Palestinian militant who was detained by the German police in Berlin on Wednesday.
The prosecutors said al-Dawah is suspected of firing a grenade into a crowd of civilians at the Palestinian Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus in 2014. But according to Zaman al-Wasl, al-Dawah had committed more crimes during his fight for the Free Palestine Movement (PFLP-GC), an armed militia fighting on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s forces in southern Damascus.
Al-Dawah appeared on Wednesday before the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice which will decide on his pre-trial detention.
The civilians at the Yarmouk camp were part of a crowd waiting for food aid when a man fired at them from an anti-tank weapon, killing seven and severely wounding three, including a six-year-old child, the German authorities said.
The camp, once the largest in Syria for Palestinian refugees, was under siege by the regime army and its allied militias from 2013 until 2018 when the army recaptured it from Islamist militants.
Al-Dawah was one of the most dangerous leaders of Palestinian militias, eye-witnesses told Zaman al-Wasl.
He had participated in the rape of women from the Yarmouk camp in the al-Bashir Mosque, as well as in the Ali al-Wahsh massacre in which dozens of demonstrators were killed and arrested, and hundreds were disappeared. He was directly responsible for firing RPG shells on civilians in Yarmouk camp during the distribution of humanitarian aid, and for starving the residents of the camp as well as bombing and destroying it.
After the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, al-Dawah, along with Abu Mohamed Serriyah, senior militia commander, had participated in the suppression of pro-democracy protests in the southern suburb of Damascus like al-Tadhamon, al-Zahera and al-Midan.
According to an eye-witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity, al-Dawah was one of the first people to join Ahmed Jibril’s militia, leading one of the groups that worked to suppress demonstrations in Yarmouk, al-Hajar al-Aswad, and Yalda, in addition to participating in the battles against the Free Syrian Army factions in the region.”
Another witness said that al-Dawah was one of the leaders of the fighting groups in the military wing of the Free Palestine Movement, al-Aqsa Shield Forces led by Said Abdulal.
Germany has "universal jurisdiction" laws that allow it to prosecute people for crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world.
A German court in February convicted and sentenced a former member of al-Assad’s security services to 4-1/2 years in prison for abetting the torture of civilians, the first such verdict for crimes against humanity in the 11-year-old Syrian civil war.
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