- Mohammed Al-Shaar was an interior minister during Assad's regime
- He was the of EU sanctions for involvement in 'violence against demonstrators'
DAMASCUS: A former minister under ousted Syrian president Bashar Assad has turned himself in, the interior ministry said Tuesday, making him one of the highest-profile figures captured by the new authorities.
“The minister of interior in the government of the defunct regime, Mohammed Al-Shaar, surrendered himself to the General Security Department,” an interior ministry statement said.
Shaar, the target of US and EU sanctions, was interior minister from 2011 to 2018 at the height of Syria’s 13-year civil war.
The security forces of the new authorities, which toppled the Assad government late last year, had been looking for Shaar and “raided sites where he had been hiding in the past few days,” the interior ministry said.
Since 2011, Shaar has been under European Union sanctions for involvement in “violence against demonstrators” who took to the streets that year to demand democracy.
The government’s brutal crackdown on the peaceful protests sparked a complex civil war that has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.
Shaar was also among top officials including Assad who were slapped with US sanctions in 2011.
In 2012, a Lebanese lawyer filed a lawsuit against Shaar, accusing him of having ordered hundreds of killings in Tripoli in 1986 when he was in charge of security in the northern Lebanon port city.
Also in 2012, Shaar survived two bomb attacks.
In December, he sustained light wounds to the shoulder after a deadly suicide bombing at the ministry, a Syrian security source told AFP at the time.
That attack was claimed by Al-Nusra Front, the jihadist precursor of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group which led the lightning rebel offensive that toppled Assad on December 8.
And in July 2012, Shaar narrowly escaped death in a bombing that killed four senior security officials including the defense minister and Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat.
Assad himself has fled to Russia, an ally of his defunct government, and some former officials in his administration are also believed to have left Syria.