Copenhagen: A Dane who claims he was jailed due to work spying on Daesh group militants wraps up his court case Friday aimed at forcing Danish authorities to confirm his story — or not.
A ruling in favor of Ahmed Samsam could help the 34-year-old fight a conviction in Spain over his alleged Daesh ties, but a win in Denmark is far from assured.
Samsam has sued Denmark’s intelligence secret service PET and military intelligence service FE to force them to admit that he was spying on foreign militant fighters for them in Syria in 2013 and 2014.
But even if his claims are true, the security services are under no obligation to confirm them.
The verdict is due in about a month.
Five years ago, the Danish national of Syrian origin was unable to prove his claim in a Spanish court, which convicted him over his Daesh ties and sent him to prison for eight years.
Samsam reiterated his claim during a trial that opened in Denmark in August, calling witnesses and citing investigative newspaper reports that backed up his claims after digging into the affair.
The intelligence services have insisted they cannot confirm the identities of their informants.
“To do so would harm their ability to speak to sources, to protect them and prevent terrorism,” their defense lawyer Peter Biering told the court when proceedings began last month.
“It’s a question of national security.”
Samsam, who has a long criminal record, traveled to Syria in 2012 of his own accord to fight the regime of Bashar Assad.
Danish authorities investigated him after his return but did not press charges.
He claims he was then sent to the war zone on several occasions, with money and equipment provided by PET and later FE, according to Danish media outlets DR and Berlingske citing anonymous witnesses and money transfers to Samsam.
In 2017, threatened by Copenhagen thugs in a settling of scores unrelated to his trips to Syria, Samsam headed to Spain.
There, he was arrested by Spanish police, who were surprised to find pictures of him on Facebook posing with a Daesh flag.
Samsam was sentenced the following year to eight years in prison for having joined Daesh, after the Danish authorities refused to come to his defense.
Since 2020 he has been serving his sentence — reduced to six years — in Denmark.
He is due to be released this autumn, according to his lawyer Irbil Kaya.
In the Danish trial, the court heard testimony from several media representatives, including the former news editor at daily newspaper Berlingske, Simon Andersen.
He testified that he had been contacted about the Samsam case on his personal email by the former head of FE, Lars Findsen — who has been indicted in an unrelated case for leaking information to the press.
Andersen told the court that Findsen suggested FE wanted to make amends by negotiating a settlement with Samsam’s lawyer at the time, Thomas Braedder.
“I perceived it as an official request coming from a person in a position of authority,” Andersen told the court.
Braedder also testified about his contacts with the intelligence services but was unable to provide the court with details for reasons of national security, he said.
Like a good spy novel, the case has enthralled the Danish public for more than six years, but embarrassed the intelligence community and politicians.
The government has been opposed to an inquiry, and in parliament, a preliminary investigative committee probe that was opened in February to shed light on Samsam’s claims was quietly dropped in June.
A Daesh militant or an undercover agent? Danish court to decide
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A Daesh militant or an undercover agent? Danish court to decide
- Ruling in favor of Ahmed Samsam could help the 34-year-old fight a conviction in Spain over his alleged Daesh ties
- The intelligence services have insisted they cannot confirm the identities of their informants
Gulf ambassadors raise concern about safety of nuclear facilities amid Israel-Iran conflict
CAIRO: Gulf Cooperation Council ambassadors have expressed concerns to UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi about the safety of nuclear facilities close to their countries amid the Israeli-Iranian crisis, Qatar state news agency reported on Saturday.
The ambassadors warned Grossi during a meeting in Vienna about the “dangerous repercussions” of targeting nuclear facilities.
The warning comes after the Israeli military said at one point on Thursday that it had struck the Russian-built Bushehr facility, but later said the comment had been made by mistake. Bushehr is Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant, which sits on the Gulf coast.
The potential consequences of an attack on the plant — contaminating the air and water — have long been a concern in the Gulf states.
Exiled former Tunisia leader sentenced to 22 years: reports
TUNIS: A Tunis court has sentenced exiled former president Moncef Marzouki in absentia to 22 years in prison for offenses related to “terrorism,” Tunisian media reported on Saturday.
Four other defendants, including his former adviser Imed Daimi and former head of the national bar association Abderrazak Kilani, were also handed the same sentence late Friday.
A staunch critic of President Kais Saied who has been living in France, Marzouki had already been sentenced in absentia to 12 years in prison in two separate cases, one involving “provoking disorder.”
The latest ruling came after a press conference held in Paris, during which he, along with Daimi and Kilani, sharply criticized state institutions and members of the Tunisian judiciary, reports said.
Marzouki, who served as Tunisia’s third president from 2011 to 2014, said in a statement the ruling was “surreal.”
He said it came as part of a “series of verdicts that have targeted some of Tunisia’s finest men and continue to provoke the world’s mockery.”
Tunisia emerged as the Arab world’s only democracy following the ousting of longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, after it kicked off the Arab Spring uprisings.
But since a sweeping power grab by Saied in July 2021 when he dissolved parliament and began ruling by decree, rights groups have warned of a sharp decline in Tunisian civil liberties.
In April, a mass trial saw around 40 public figures, mainly critics of the authorities, sentenced to long terms on charges including plotting against the state.
Other media figures and lawyers also critical of Saied have been prosecuted and detained under a law he enacted in 2022 to prohibit “spreading false news.”
Syrian security forces detain cousin of toppled leader Assad
Syria’s security forces have detained Wassim Assad, a cousin of toppled leader Bashar Assad, state news agency SANA said on Saturday.
Wassim Assad was sanctioned by the United States in 2023 for leading a paramilitary force backing Assad’s army and for trafficking drugs including the amphetamine-like drug captagon.
Bashar Assad was toppled by an Islamist-led rebel insurgency in December and fled to Moscow. Most of his family members and inner circle either fled Syria or went underground.
Syria’s new security forces have been pursuing members of the former administration — mainly those involved in the feared security branches accused of rights abuses.
Rights groups have called for a fully-fledged transitional justice process to hold them to account.
Turkiye’s Erdogan says Israel attacks aimed to sabotage Iran nuclear talks
- Around 40 diplomats are slated to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation
ANKARA: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that Israel’s attacks on Iran right before a new round of nuclear talks with the United States aimed to sabotage the negotiations, and it showed Israel did not want to resolve issues through diplomacy.
Speaking at a foreign ministers’ meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul, Erdogan urged countries with influence over Israel not to listen to its “poison” and to seek a solution to the fighting via dialogue without allowing a wider conflict.
He also called on Muslim countries to increase their efforts to impose punitive measures against Israel on the basis of international law and United Nations’ resolutions.
Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi earlier arrived in Istanbul on Saturday, Tasnim news agency reported, for a meeting with diplomats to discuss Tehran’s escalating conflict with Israel.
Around 40 diplomats were expected to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), as Israel and Iran continue to exchange missile strikes.
“The Foreign Minister arrived in Istanbul this morning to participate in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Foreign Ministers’ meeting,” Tasnim reported.
Araghchi met with his counterparts from Britain, France and Germany in Geneva on Friday.
“At this meeting, at the suggestion of Iran, the issue of the Zionist regime’s attack on our country will be specifically addressed,” said Araghchi, according to the news agency.
Israel began its assault in the early hours of June 13, saying Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, triggering an immediate retaliation from Tehran in the worst-ever confrontation between the two arch-rivals.
Earlier on Friday, Araghchi said Tehran was ready to “consider diplomacy” again only if Israel’s “aggression is stopped.”
The ministers are expected to release a statement following their meeting, the Turkish state news agency Anadolu said.
UN urges more support to speed up Syria refugee returns
- According to UNHCR, some 13.5 million Syrians remain displaced internally or abroad
- Wide scale destruction, including to basic infrastructure, remains a major barrier to returns
DAMASCUS: UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi has urged more international support for Syria to speed up reconstruction and enable further refugee returns after some 14 years of civil war.
“I am here also to really make an appeal to the international community to provide more help, more assistance to the Syrian government in this big challenge of recovery of the country,” Grandi told reporters on Friday on the sidelines of a visit to Damascus.
Syrians who had been displaced internally or fled abroad have begun gradually returning home since the December overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar Assad, whose brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 triggered war.
But the wide-scale destruction, including to basic infrastructure, remains a major barrier to returns.
Grandi said over two million people had returned to their areas of origin, including around 1.5 million internally displaced people, while some 600,000 others have come back from neighboring countries including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkiye.
“Two million of course is only a fraction of the very big number of Syrian refugees and displaced, but it is a very big figure,” he said.
According to UNHCR, some 13.5 million Syrians remain displaced internally or abroad.
Syria’s conflict displaced around half the pre-war population, with many internally displaced people seeking refuge in camps in the northwest.
Grandi said that after Assad’s toppling, the main obstacle to returns was “a lack of services, lack of housing, lack of work,” adding that his agency was working with Syrian authorities and governments in the region “to help people go back.”
He said he discussed the importance of the sustainability of returns with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani, including ensuring “that people don’t move again because they don’t have a house or they don’t have a job or they don’t have electricity” or other services such as health.
Sustainable returns “can only happen if there is recovery, reconstruction in Syria, not just for the returnees, for all Syrians,” he said.
He added that he also discussed with Shaibani how to “encourage donors to give more resources for this sustainability.”
With the recent lifting of Western sanctions, the new Syrian authorities hope for international support to launch reconstruction, which the UN estimates could cost more than $400 billion.
