Bunni, once a thorn in the side of Damascus officials, helped find witnesses willing to testify.Īnwar Raslan arriving at court to face trial in Germany. Nearly a decade into Syria’s civil war, Raslan has become the first person to face trial – anywhere in the world – over the state-sponsored torture and murder of civilians during the conflict. This time Bunni was working with the authorities, assisting German prosecutors, while the other Anwar faced prison. Yet within four years, the two men’s paths would cross again, their former positions reversed, as Germany prepared a landmark court case. “I don’t hate him as a person,” Bunni says of Raslan.

Raslan became a police officer, before transferring to the intelligence services, where he would help detain Bunni.Īt the time, Bunni thought little more of the meeting, settling back to his legal files, pursuing at a distance the same struggle against the Syrian state and its abusers that had consumed him for decades. The two Anwars, born four years apart, had both studied law, but chose to use it on opposite sides of Syria’s authoritarian political system. “Then, after a few days, one of my friends said, ‘Did you know Anwar Raslan is in Marienfelde with you?’ And then I realised.” I didn’t want to believe that Europe would spend all this time standing by and watching. “I was with my wife, and I said to her, ‘I know this man’ but I couldn’t remember who he was,” he recalls. Bunni, a human rights lawyer with more than three decades’ experience fighting the Syrian regime in the courts, and several years spent inside its jails for his trouble, was part of a large network of colleagues, clients, friends and former opponents.

Even so, thousands of Syrians had already found their way to Berlin. It was 2014, a year before Angela Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees drew more than a million people fleeing war and hardship to the country. There was a vague flicker of recognition, but Bunni couldn’t quite place the other man. Both men were buying groceries in a Turkish shop near the gates of Marienfelde, the Berlin refugee camp they now called home. A nwar al-Bunni had only been in Germany a couple of months when he walked into a shop and found himself face to face with the man he believes had interrogated and jailed him nearly a decade earlier.

Bunni how we first met youtube