A German jihadist suspect goes on trial Tuesday for war crimes in Syria after allegedly posing for photographs holding the severed heads of two victims of the conflict.
At the first trial in Germany for war crimes committed in Syria’s five-year-old war, Aria Ladjedvardi, 21, tells the court he “didn’t want to be in” the incriminating pictures, and that he “could not imagine that they would be circulated on social media.”
Prosecutors have accused Ladjedvardi of a war crime as he had treated the unidentified victims “in a degrading and humiliating manner.”
The photographs in which Ladjedvardi appears were taken in the spring of 2014 and posted on Facebook. Federal prosecutors believe he and two fellow fighters took the pictures to belittle their victims, whom they considered infidels or nonbelievers.
They also believe that Ladjedvardin, a German of Iranian origin, traveled to Syria in early 2014 to join one of the jihadist groups engaged in the fight against President Bashar Assad’s regime.
But Ladjedvardi, who risks at least one year in prison, contests the claims at the opening of his trial in Frankfurt, arguing that he was in Syria to help victims of Assad’s regime.
— AFP
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