BALADI NEWS
A senior member of Syrian Islamist armed group Jaysh al-Islam implicated in the disappearance of a prominent activist in 2013 has been arrested in France and charged with war crimes and torture, a judicial source told AFP on Friday.
The suspect, a former spokesman of the group who is in his early thirties, was in France on an Erasmus student visa and detained in the southern city of Marseille.
He appeared before an investigating magistrate in Paris who charged him with torture, war crimes and complicity in forced disappearances, said the source.
Jaysh al-Islam is one of several hardline Islamist groups opposing the Damascus regime that have emerged during the Syrian civil war.
It has fought against Islamic State (IS) jihadists but also been accused by rights groups of abuses.
It is notably suspected of involvement in the December 2013 kidnapping of the Syrian activist Razan Zaitouneh, her husband Wael Hamada and two colleagues, Samira Khalil and Nazem Hammadi. They have never been found.
Zaitouneh was one of the most prominent civil society figures in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that erupted in March 2011 as part of the Arab spring but then descended into civil war.
Source: Daily Mail Online.