French judges have issued arrest warrants for seven former senior Syrian officials, including ousted dictator Bashar Assad, over the 2012 bombing of a press center in Homs, a judicial source and a rights group said Tuesday.
Homs, in western Syria, was a major opposition stronghold during the Syrian civil war and was besieged by the Assad regime forces from 2011 to 2014. The siege ended with the anti-Assad forces withdrawing from the city.
A rocket hit the "informal press center" on Feb. 22, 2012, killing renowned American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik and injuring two other journalists and an interpreter.
The International Federation for Human Rights said the seven former officials had been accused of complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity for the attack on the centre.
France allows the filing of crimes against humanity cases in its courts. The judicial source said the seven European arrest warrants had been issued last month.
Another human rights organization, the Syrian Centre for Media and Free Expression, said the French judicial investigation had found that the attack had deliberately targeted foreign journalists.
"The judicial investigation clearly established that the attack on the informal press center in Bab Amr was part of the Syrian regime's explicit intention to target foreign journalists in order to limit media coverage of its crimes and force them to leave the city and the country," said Mazen Darwish, a lawyer and the general director of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, in a statement.
Assad fled to Russia in December 2024 when opposition forces seized Syria with a rapid offensive, ending more than five decades of autocratic rule by his family.
