Germany arrests 2 Syrian extremist suspects

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The men, whose surnames weren’t published due to German privacy rules, were arrested Wednesday and Thursday in the western cities of Duesseldorf and Giessen and their apartments were raided. They were due to appear before a judge Thursday.

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Prosecutors said the men belong to a Nusra Front unit which also included Abd Arahman A. K., a Syrian in his early 30s who was arrested in Germany in June on suspicion of being part of a plot to carry out a bomb attack in Duesseldorf.

Human rights groups have pressed governments to bring people suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria to trial, as part of an effort to resolve the long-running conflict.

The European Center for constitutional and Human Rights, or ECCHR, said Thursday it has helped submit the first criminal complaint in Germany against six high-level Syrian military intelligence officials, in the hope that federal prosecutors will take up the case under the principle of universal jurisdiction. This allows German courts to try crimes committed outside the country, though legal experts say that they are unlikely to do so unless there’s a reasonable chance of bringing the perpetrators to Germany.

The ECCHR complaint was filed together with seven Syrian torture survivors and two Syrian lawyers. “In Syria there is total impunity, which produces further violence. Without justice there will be no political solution to the conflict,” Mazen Darwish, one of the Syrian lawyers, was quoted as saying in a statement.

In a separate case, federal prosecutors said they had charged a 19-year-old Lebanese man with membership in the Islamic State organization on allegations he trained with the extremist group in Syria in 2015 and fought in Iraq. The suspect, identified only as Tarik A., returned to Germany in January 2016 and was arrested in Duesseldorf on Wednesday.

Munich prosecutors also announced the arrest of a 33-year-old Bosnian man on allegations he supported the terrorist group Junud al-Sham by delivering them vehicles. The man, whose name wasn’t released, was arrested Tuesday in the Nuremberg area.

Kirsten Grieshaber And Frank Jordans, The Associated Press