A Damascus court sentences Wassim al-Assad to death for murder and torture
The ruling came at the sixth hearing since his arrest at the Lebanese border last year, ordered every asset he holds transferred to the treasury, and cleared him on the drug charges for want of evidence.
The state news agency SANA reported that the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus sentenced Wassim al-Assad, a cousin of the ousted president Bashar al-Assad, to death on Tuesday on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and the deliberate killing of several people.
The presiding judge, Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan, held that the killings he ordered were carried out with torture and brutality, and that an armed group tied to him seized Syrians and killed them. The court also ordered that every asset he holds, movable and immovable, pass to the state treasury.
The conduct the court judged goes back to the first year of the uprising. It found that he raised and led pro-government paramilitary formations from early 2011 on the orders of Brigadier General Ghiath Dalla, a Fourth Division commander under Maher al-Assad, and that those formations joined military operations against civilian districts in Eastern Ghouta, Mleiha above all, and attacked a shop in Jaramana.
He was acquitted on one count. The court judged the evidence behind the drug-trafficking charges he also faced too thin to convict on.
Wassim al-Assad is 46 and was born in Latakia on the Syrian coast. He was arrested on 21 June 2025 near the border with Lebanon as he came back from there, and his trial opened three days later. Tuesday's ruling closed its sixth hearing.
The same court had passed death sentences a week earlier, on 11 August, on Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher and Atef Najib. Najib stood in the courtroom, having been held since January 2025. The two brothers were sentenced in their absence, which is the limit these proceedings keep meeting: the most senior names are being judged where they cannot be reached.
The war those proceedings are reckoning with killed some 500,000 Syrians over 14 years and drove between 13 and 14 million people from their homes out of a pre-war population of 22 million. What the courts have delivered so far is a handful of verdicts at the top of that structure, and a sentence that can be enforced only against the men who stayed.