A 27-year-old asylum seeker has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Austria after being convicted of war crimes over the killing of 20 wounded Syrian government soldiers.

The man, who has not been named, was found guilty on Wednesday of “murder as a terrorism offence” by five members of an eight-strong jury in Innsbruck.

The three-day trial began in February, but had to be adjourned twice on medical grounds after the man collapsed in court.

The main evidence against him was a confession he gave to regional officials. The court refused to believe the defendant’s repeated claims that he had been incorrectly translated.

“He explained that he had shot dead badly wounded soldiers,” the translator said in evidence to the court. “I even asked him again and he confirmed it.” He said a written version of the confession was translated back to the man at the end of the questioning and he had signed every page of it.

The man, who has a Palestinian passport but was born and grew up in a refugee camp in the Syrian city of Homs, was arrested at a refugee shelter in the Austrian state of Tyrol last June after a Syrian man came forward to denounce him.

The man had apparently boasted to other residents at the shelter that he had belonged to the Faruq Brigade, a subgroup of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), and had fought against troops loyal to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in Homs in 2013 and 2014. He travelled to Austria and sought asylum in May 2015.

On the first day of his trial he stated he had not killed anyone and that he was innocent. He and his brother had taken part in the 2011 demonstrations against the Assad regime, he said, and were persecuted as a result.

“The regime killed my brother,” he told the court through a translator. “I had a gun in order that I could defend myself and my family.” He said he had never taken a direct part in fighting, and the gun he possessed was a Kalashnikov given to him by the FSA for self-defence.



Guido Steinberg, an expert on the Syrian war, told the court that the Faruq Brigade is not regarded as a terrorist organisation. “It is completely normal in this conflict that prisoners are murdered, regardless of what side they are,” he said.



In his closing argument Thomas Willam, prosecuting, spoke of an “overwhelming state of evidence” against the man. The accused had made a confession “of his own free will”, he said and in addition “repeatedly stated during his interrogation by the police [...] that he had indeed shot these people”.

The killing of wounded soldiers contravenes the Geneva convention, and is considered a war crime. The man said he had simply been relating his experience of the war but this was misunderstood as him saying that he had been responsible for the deaths he witnessed.

There were no known witnesses to the killings.

The man’s defence lawyers claimed shortcomings in both the police’s questioning of him and in their investigatory proceedings. “There is a difference between what is in the [written confession] and what the accused actually said,” Laszlo Szabo, a lawyer for the accused told the jurors.

He called the accusations “very thin” and questioned why the court appeared keen to bring the trial to a swift close.

According to the Vienna daily newspaper Der Standard, the jury members appeared overwhelmed by the complicated details they were confronted with during the brief trial, not least the complexities of the Syrian war. There were also repeated linguistic misunderstandings between the accused and the court, despite the presence of a translator.

The man will serve his sentence in Austria. He cannot be extradited to Syria because of the war.

The man was put on trial according to the principle of universal jurisdiction, which is widely accepted by many states. Usually applied to the most serious offences, it allows courts in one country to try suspects in their domestic courts for charges such as war crimes or torture that were committed abroad.

The UK has universal jurisdiction over a small number of serious offences. Last year, for example, a Nepalese army officer was tried at the Old Bailey for torture allegedly inflicted on Maoist rebels in his home country. He was acquitted.