The man is said to have fired a grenade into a crowd in Damascus in 2014. The federal prosecutor’s office accuses him of murder and dangerous bodily harm.
The federal prosecutor’s office arrested a suspected Syrian war criminal in Berlin. As the federal prosecutor announced, the 54-year-old is said to have fired a grenade from an anti-tank weapon into a crowd in a square in the capital Damascus. At least seven people were killed at that time. Three others were seriously injured, including a six-year-old child. The victims were civilians waiting for food parcels from the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East.

The accused Syrian was a member of the Free Palestine Movement group at the time, the authority in Karlsruhe announced. Previously he was a member of the so-called Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. Therefore, these armed militias exercised control over the affected part of Damascus, which had emerged from a Palestinian refugee camp, on behalf of the Syrian regime. In the meantime, this had been completely sealed off.

The Federal Public Prosecutor had commissioned the Berlin State Criminal Police Office to investigate this case in 2020, said a police spokeswoman in Berlin. The federal prosecutor’s office accuses the man of war crimes, murder in seven cases and dangerous bodily harm in three cases. An investigative judge of the Federal Court of Justice wants to decide whether the arrested person will be in custody during the day. When he was arrested in the morning, officials from the Berlin State Criminal Police Office also searched his apartment.