The case is one of the first attempts to bring former members of Bashar al-Assad’s regime to justice

A former commander in the Syrian secret police who allegedly supervised the torture of 4,000 opponents of the Assad regime was arrested after he appealed to the German authorities for protection, it has been claimed.

Anwar Raslan, 57, has been charged with crimes against humanity, rape, aggravated sexual assault and 58 murders relating to his time in Branch 251, a notorious intelligence unit with its own prison in Damascus.

After the outbreak of the Syrian civil war he fled to Europe in 2013, seeking asylum in Germany with his family the following summer.

A leaked copy of his indictment claims that Mr Raslan reinvented himself as a dissident and approached the Berlin police in 2015, claiming that he feared he might be assassinated by agents