Kremlin-supported mercenary soldiers who worked for the Wagner Group could be tested in Russian courts for the first time after a renowned team of human rights lawyers opened a case in Moscow accusing militants of torture and beheading of a man in Syria.
In a criminal complaint announced on Monday on behalf of the victim, Muhammad “Hamdi Bouta” Taha al-Abdullah, lawyers representing the victim’s brother claim that six Russian citizens who worked on a contract to secure a gas plant operated by Russia-Syria were behind the 2017 killings. The process marks the first known attempt to hold anyone connected to the top secret network of secret operators financed and administered by members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
Opponents of the paramilitary black money team hope that an attack through the courts – which they hope to bring to the European Court of Human Rights – exposes the scale of the abuses by the dark forces used to hide the Kremlin invasion – books of military adventures in Worldwide. After more than a year of preventing the government and avoiding accusations about the case, the victim’s defenders say, Russian authorities will now be forced to officially declare whatever happens.
“Hopefully, this will open the door to all crimes committed by the Wagner Group not just in Syria,” said Mazen Darwish, one of several human rights activists who are pushing for justice in the case and director-general of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.
In a telephone interview with The Daily Beast on Saturday, Darwish said the case against the Wagner Group’s six paramilitaries is being brought under articles of the Russian penal code calling for the prosecution of anyone involved in torture, serious bodily harm and murder. “They cannot say that this is just a political or propaganda issue because we are taking this case to the Russian courts, according to Russian law. We are going to Moscow, its territory, its courts and its jurisdiction, ”said Darwish.
Allegations of 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 appeared in an anonymous post on a subchannel Reddit popular with military geeks. The post did not provide many comments, just a link to a violent video recorded with a shaking hand on a cell phone that showed several Russian-speaking men dressed in desert military uniforms taking turns to beat up a man who was once identified as Bouta with a sledgehammer.
Lawyers and human rights defenders involved in the Moscow case say the denunciation marks an important first step towards making Russian mercenaries affiliated with the Wagner Group accountable for a series of war crimes committed not only in Syria, but in Libya and Libya. Central African Republic, where several related companies linked to a well-connected Kremlin insider and a former Russian intelligence official have been operating at least since 2017.
The petition filed on Friday in connection with the Bouta case states that the Russian government has effective control over the private Russian military contingent that killed Bouta during operations at the al-Shaer gas plant.
Colloquially known as the Wagner Group, the contingent is linked to a network of Russian companies that US and European officials say are funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a key player in Putin’s inner circle known as “Putin’s chef”. Although the Wagner Group has been implicated in several violations of international law, including circumventing a UN arms embargo in Libya, the Moscow lawsuit in Bouta’s case marks the first time that any official complaint has been filed in court against the contingent of private security in connection with an alleged war crime.
Last month, the FBI placed Prigozhin on its Most Wanted list in connection with its purported role in interfering in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, offering a $ 250,000 reward for information that led to his arrest. The US government has also sanctioned Prigozhin for its alleged ties to Russian mercenaries affiliated with the Wagner Group.
The legal case in Moscow revolves around four separate music videos depicting several Russian-speaking men beating, beheading and burning a mutilated man at the al-Shaer gas plant, a central node in a multimillion-dollar oil and gas deal between the Syrian government owned General Petroleum Corporation and Stroytransgaz, a Russian state-owned hydrocarbon engineering company headed by Gennady Timchenko, a former Putin associate.
Neither Timchenko nor Prigozhin was specifically mentioned in connection with Bouta’s murder.
Media and think tank reports indicate that the extraction of natural gas by EvroPolis, a company in which Prigozhin holds a stake according to US authorities, generated about $ 162 million in al-Shaer and several other gas fields in 2017, the same year that Bouta was killed.
Representatives of Stroytransgaz and Prigozhin’s main company, Concord Consulting and Management, did not respond to requests for comment made before lawyers representing Bouta’s family made public the 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 and started to circulate widely on Russian social media platforms.
A few days after the second tranche of videos posted by open source investigators on Twitter, reporters from al-Jessr Press, a Paris-based media outlet reporting on Syria, published the first report of Bouta’s murder. A few days later, Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s only independent daily news outlets, published a report naming 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 Donbass region of eastern Ukraine before traveling to Syria to work for a contingent affiliated with the Wagner Group.
Bouta was born in August 1986 in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor, in a village not far from where one of his alleged attackers, Vlaidslav Apostol, was killed just a few months after assaulting Bouta with a sledgehammer. Apostol’s family reportedly confirmed that he worked as a private security contractor in Syria and that he was one of several hundred Russians killed in a U.S. air strike in the northeastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor.
After his brief stint in the Syrian Arab Army, Bouta went to work in the construction industry, working mainly as a bricklayer. He got married and started a family. When the civil war broke out, 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 by Bouta’s last days given to lawyers by your family.
After working for a period in Lebanon, Bouta decided to return to his family in Deir Ezzor. On March 27, 2017, Bouta crossed the border from Lebanon to Syria at the Beirut-Damascus crossing with a group of young people from his village. Syrian authorities arrested Bouta as he crossed the border and handed him over to Syrian military personnel. At this point, members of the Bouta group were traveling with the notified Bouta’s brother-in-law, who was in Lebanon at the time, that the Syrian military had taken Bouta into custody.
Bouta later came into direct contact with his brother-in-law and told him that members of the Syrian Arab Army took him to the military camp in al-Draij, a well-known center for deploying fighters from the Wagner Group. Before being killed, Bouta said Russian-speaking soldiers surrounded him and several others in custody in al-Draij to fight contingents sent to Homs to confiscate and protect the oil and gas infrastructure.
The Syrian government controls the production and export of oil, gas and minerals, and the Syrian General Petroleum Company defines the strategy for exploration and development and oversees national subsidiaries, including the Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC) and the Syrian Gas Company ( SGC). But, as in many other developing countries, Syria’s nationalized energy sector relies heavily on external support from foreign companies for upstream capital-intensive investments in exploration and development.
Stroytransgaz, or STG, the company headed by Kremlin member Timchenko, is one of the biggest investors and, in February, secured a $ 22 million production-sharing agreement with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to The Syria Report, online newspaper that follows the country’s economic evolution.
Ilya Novikov, one of the Russian lawyers who filed the innovative legal action, said in a written statement that he and his lawyer, Petr Zaikin, decided to start the case after a request to the Russian Investigative Committee, the main prosecuting body of the country, apparently fell to the ground.
Novikov said Novaya Gazeta asked the Investigation Committee to open an investigation into the murder, but the committee ignored the request. “This forced us, as human rights defenders, to turn to the Russian investigative authorities, said Novikov. “In fact, this is a repeat of what happened 20 years ago, when forced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions committed during the armed conflict in the North Caucasus were also not investigated.”
Mazen Darwish, one of several human rights activists who are pushing for justice in Bouta’s case and director general of the Syrian Media and Freedom of Expression Center, said Russian authorities have about 40 days to respond to the initial lawsuit.
The case is being presented jointly by lawyers and defenders associated with the Darwish organization, the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow and the International Federation for Human Rights in Paris. If for some reason the case is not pursued in Moscow, Darwish said, he, Novikov and others are likely to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
In 2018, American authorities filed criminal lawsuits against Prigozhin for alleged financial ties to the Internet troll farm, accused of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It was unclear, however, whether the case would go ahead after federal prosecutors working under the Trump administration dropped the charges against St. Petersburg-based Prigozhin’s Concord Consulting and Management company in relation to the case. But a federal arrest warrant issued for Prigozhin in Washington, DC, on February 16, appears to indicate a renewed interest by the Justice Department in seeing Prigozhin brought to justice.
Under an American law of 2019 known as the César Syria Civil Protection Act, anyone linked to war crimes in Syria under the Assad regime may be subject to sanctions. While it is not clear whether US officials would seek additional sanctions against Prigozhin, Timchenko or any other entity involved in legal filings and reports in Bouta’s case, the facts certainly suggest that American investigators in Washington will closely monitor their outcome.