PARIS (AFP) – The French judiciary is investigating the 2012 deaths of reporters in Syria as a possible crime against humanity, anti-terror prosecutors told AFP.
Prominent United States (US) journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed by an explosion in the east of the war-torn country in what a US court later ruled was an “unconscionable” attack that targeted journalists on the orders of the Syrian government.
The French judiciary had been treating the alleged attack as a potential war crime, but on December 17 widened the investigation to a possible crime against humanity, a charge for which French courts claim universal jurisdiction regardless of locations or nationalities involved.
The anti-terror prosecutors’ office told AFP that new evidence pointed to “the execution of a concerted plan against a group of civilians, including journalists, activists and defenders of human rights, as part of a wide-ranging or systematic attack”.
Colvin – a renowned war correspondent whose career was celebrated in a Golden Globe-nominated film A Private War – was killed in the Syrian army’s shelling of the Baba Amr Media Centre in Homs on February 22, 2012.
The federal court in the US capital, which in 2019 ordered Syria to pay USD302.5 million over her death, said in its verdict that Syrian military and intelligence had tracked the broadcasts of Colvin and other journalists covering the siege of Homs to the media centre.
They then targeted it in an artillery barrage that killed Colvin and Ochlik. French investigators also believe that both were “deliberately targeted”. In addition, they extended the probe to cover suspected Syrian government “persecution” of civilians, including Colvin and Ochlik.
