The fourth Criminal Court of the transitional justice in Damascus issued on Thursday a death sentence against former regime informant Abdel Nasser Buraqi after convicting him of grave crimes during the rule of ousted President Bashar al-Assad. The accusations include forced disappearance, denial of freedom, participation in murder, torture leading to death, theft and criminal defamation. Lawyer Radif Mustafa, Director of the Accountability and Justice Department at the National Commission for Transitional Justice, told the state news agency SANA that the court relied on international law to characterize the offenses as war crimes and crimes against humanity, in line with the Constitutional Declaration, to determine the nature, gravity, and causes of the crimes. Meanwhile, the court based its sentencing on the provisions of Syrian national law Mustafa said the court decided to merge the sentences and apply the harshest penalty, which is execution. It upheld the provisional seizure of the convict's assets, converting it into an executive seizure, and denied him any discretionary mitigating circumstances due to the massive scale and gravity of the committed crimes, he said in a post on Facebook. He added that the ruling was a "the first judicial precedent in Syria's history." "While informants were protected during the era of the ousted regime, they are now facing justice. This is the group that harmed people the most," he stressed. Meanwhile, internal security forces in Latakia announced the arrest of Major Generals Haitham Barakat and Marwan Barakat, both officers from the ousted regime, during an operation in the city of Qardaha. This operation follows several similar ones across various governorates. Security forces in Daraa announced on August 15 the arrest of Musab Abu Rukba, a former regime lieutenant colonel in the Raqqa Political Security branch. The forces said the arrests are part of counter-terrorism efforts aimed at strengthening security and stability. Separately, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Russia granted Assad asylum on humanitarian grounds, not political ones. Speaking at a press conference during which she was asked whether Moscow would turn him over to the new Syrian authorities, she replied: "There were and are no political grounds behind his stay in our country. The decision was made solely on humanitarian grounds: the dramatic circumstances of the change of power in Syria meant that he and his family faced death." The authorities in Syria sentenced Assad to death in absentia earlier in August.
