Mercenaries backed by the Kremlin who worked for the Wagner group could be tried for the very first time in Russian courts after an everyday team of human rights lawyers filed a case in Moscow in which they accused the militants of torture and beheaded a man. Syria.
In a legal criminal complaint announced on Monday on behalf of the victim, Muhammad “Hamdi Bouta” Taha al-Abdullah, lawyers representing the victim’s brother, claimed that six Russian citizens who were working on a contract for a Russian To secure Syrian gas plant, behind the 2017 assassination. The lawsuit is the first known attempt to prosecute someone linked to the top-secret network of secret operators, funded and run by close associates of President Vladimir Putin.
Opponents of the dark money paramilitary outfit hope that an attack by the courts – which will take them to the European Court of Human Rights – will expose the extent of the abuse of the shadow forces used to hide the Kremlin. -books military adventures around the world. Advocates for the victim say Russian authorities will now be forced to keep a record, no matter what, stoning more than a year of government accusations over the case.
“Hopefully, it will open the door to all the crimes committed by the Wagner group, not just in Syria,” said Mazen Darwish, one of several human rights activists who called for justice in the case and director general of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom. of expression.
Darwish said in a telephone interview with The Daily Beast on Saturday that the case against the six paramilitary groups of the Wagner group is being filed under articles in Russian criminal law that prosecute someone involved in torture, serious bodily injury and murder. , must continue. “They can not say that it is merely a political issue or propaganda, because we are bringing this matter under Russian law before Russian courts. “We are going to Moscow, to their territory, to their courts and to their jurisdiction,” Darwish said.
Allegations about the Wagner group’s involvement in the torture and murder of al-Abdullah, better known by his nicknames, Hamdi or Hamadi Bouta, first surfaced in June 2017 when a two-minute video clip of the murder appears in an anonymous post. on a Reddit subchannel popular with military geeks. The report did not make much comment, just a link to a graphic violent video shot with a shaky hand on a cell phone in which several Russian-speaking men dressed in desert military uniforms in turn beat a man who has since been identified as Bouta is a sledgehammer.
Lawyers and human rights lawyers involved in the case in Moscow say the complaint is an important first step in prosecuting Russian mercenaries linked to the Wagner group for a number of war crimes not only in Syria but also in Libya and the Central African Republic. related businesses linked to a well-connected Kremlin insider and a one-time Russian intelligence official have reportedly been operating since at least 2017.
In the order submitted on Friday in connection with Bouta’s case, it is alleged that the Russian government has effective control over the Russian private military contingent that killed Bouta during operations at the Al-Shaer gas plant.
The contingent, popularly known as the Wagner Group, is linked to a network of Russian companies funded by US and European authorities, according to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a key player in Putin’s inner circle. As ‘Putin’s boss’. Although the Wagner group has been involved in several violations of international law, including a UN arms embargo in Libya, the Moscow lawsuit in the Bouta case is the first time an official charge against the private security condition has been brought to court. . with an alleged war crime.
Last month, the FBI placed Prigozhin on its Most Wanted list in connection with its alleged role in interfering in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections and offering a $ 250,000 reward for information that led to his arrest. The US government also approved Prigozhin for his alleged ties to Russian mercenaries attached to the Wagner group.
The Moscow lawsuit revolves around four separate video clips in which several Russian-speaking men beat, beheaded and burned a badly mutilated man at the al-Shaer gas plant, a central hub in a million-dollar joint oil and gas deal , forged between the Syrian government, owned by General Petroleum Corporation and Stroytransgaz, a Russian state-owned hydrocarbon engineering firm led by Gennady Timchenko, a longtime collaborator of Putin.
Neither Timchenko nor Prigozhin are explicitly mentioned in connection with the assassination of Bouta.
According to media and think tank reports, the extraction of natural gas by EvroPolis, a Prigozhin firm, according to U.S. authorities, was a stake in Al-Shaer and several other nearby gas fields in 2017, the same year Bouta was killed.
Representatives of the main firm Concord Consulting and Management of Stroytransgaz and Prigozhin did not respond to requests for comment before lawyers representing Bouta’s family were released with details of the Moscow court case on Monday.
After the first video was posted anonymously in June 2017, three more were posted in November 2019 that started spreading widely on Russian social media platforms.
Reporters from al-Jessr Press, a Paris-based media outlet covering Syria, released the first report of Bouta’s murder within days of the open source investigators being posted on Twitter. A few days later, Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s only remaining independent daily newspapers, has published a report citing Stanislav Dychko as one of several Russian citizens portrayed in the video. The report also revealed that at least one of the Russian-speaking men in the video fought in the fighting region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine before traveling to Syria to fight for a contingent attached to the Wagner group. work.
Bouta was born in a village in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor in August 1986, not far from where one of his alleged assailants, Vlaidslav Apostol, died, just months after hitting Bouta with a sledgehammer. Apostol’s family has confirmed that he worked as a private security contractor in Syria and that he was one of hundreds of Russians killed during a US air strike in the northeastern province of Deir Ezzor.
After his short time in the Syrian Arab army, Bouta went to work in the construction industry and worked mainly as a mason. He is married and has started a family. When the civil war began, he traveled to Lebanon to find construction work after the situation in Syria deteriorated and large parts of Deir Ezzor came under ISIS control, according to a report from Bouta’s last days that his family gave to lawyers.
After working for a time in Lebanon, Bouta decided to return to his family in Deir Ezzor. On March 27, 2017, Bouta travels across the border from Lebanon to Syria at the Beirut-Damascus crossing with a group of young men from his town. Syrian authorities arrested Bouta as he crossed the border and handed himself over to members of the Syrian army. At this point, members of the Bouta group travel with Bouta’s brother-in-law, who was then in Lebanon, informed that the Syrian army had arrested Bouta.
Bouta later came into direct contact with his brother-in-law and told him that members of the Syrian Arab army had taken him to the al-Draij military camp, a well-known deployment center for fighters of the Wagner group. Before he was killed, Bouta said Russian-speaking soldiers had pushed him and several others into custody at al-Draij to fight warfare in Homs to seize and protect oil and gas infrastructure.
The Government of Syria controls the production and export of oil, gas and minerals, and Syria’s General Petroleum Company establishes exploration and development strategy and oversees national subsidiaries including Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC) and Syrian Gas Company (SGC) . But, as in many other developing countries, Syria’s nationalized energy sector is highly dependent on external support from foreign companies for capital-intensive upstream investments in exploration and development.
Stroytransgaz, or STG, the company led by Kremlin insider Timchenko, is one of the largest investors and secured a $ 22 million production agreement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government in February, according to The Syria Report, an online journal that monitors economic developments in the country.
Ilya Novikov, one of the Russian lawyers who filed the groundbreaking complaint, said in a written statement that he and his fellow councilor Petr Zaikin had decided to initiate the case following a claim for the Russian investigative committee, the country ‘s largest prosecuting body. , apparently fell flat.
Novikov said Novaya Gazeta had asked the investigative committee to investigate the murder, but the committee ignored the request. “This has forced us, as human rights defenders, to turn to the Russian investigative authorities,” Novikov said. “It is indeed a repetition of what happened 20 years ago when forced disappearances, torture and executions during the armed conflict in the North Caucasus were also not investigated.”
Mazen Darwish, one of several human rights activists pleading for Bouta’s case for justice and director general of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, said the Russian authorities had about 40 days to respond to the initial court case. .
The case is being brought together by lawyers and advocates attached to Darwish’s organization, the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow and the International Federation for Human Rights in Paris. If the case does not go on in Moscow for some reason, Darwish said, it is likely that he, Novikov and others will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
In 2018, U.S. authorities filed criminal charges against Prigozhin for alleged financial ties to the Internet troll accused of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However, it was unclear whether the case would continue after federal prosecutors under the Trump administration worked, the charges against Prigozhin’s firm Concord Consulting and Management in St. Petersburg in connection with the case. But a federal arrest warrant issued for Prigozhin in Washington, DC on Feb. 16 appears to have renewed interest in the Justice Department in holding Prigozhin accountable.
Under a 2019 U.S. law known as the Caesar Syria Civil Protection Act, anyone involved in war crimes in Syria under Assad’s government could be subject to sanctions. While it is not clear whether U.S. authorities would follow further sanctions against Prigozhin, Timchenko or any of the other entities filed at Bouta’s reporting and lawsuit, the facts certainly indicate that U.S. investigators in Washington will closely follow the outcome.