Syria's Interior Minister said former brigadier general Adnan Abboud Halawa has been detained over his suspected role in a 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta that killed more than 1,500 people.
In a post on X, Anas Khattab said Mr Halawa was “one of the most prominent officers responsible” for the attack and was now in the custody of the counter-terrorism directorate.
Eastern Ghouta, then a rebel-held enclave on the outskirts of Damascus, was hit in the attack two years into Syria's civil war, when rockets carrying sarin, a nerve agent, struck Ghouta's eastern districts of Ein Tarma and Zamalka and Moadamiyah district in the west.
The Unified Ghouta Medical Office recorded 1,466 deaths in Eastern Ghouta and 100 more in Western Ghouta. More than 10,000 people were treated for symptoms.
An investigation overseen by the UN did not assign responsibility for the attack. The Syrian government at the time denied any responsibility, but a White House report said with “high confidence” that the government of then-president Bashar Al Assad was responsible.
The use of chemical weapons is a war crime under international law. Victims and families have sought justice and accountability over the Ghouta atrocity.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons also accused the Assad regime of a 2018 chlorine gas attack on Douma, which killed 43 people, and a 2017 attack on Ltamenah in Hama province involving sarin and chlorine, which affected at least 106 people.
The arrest of Mr Halawa is part of a wider crackdown on former regime figures following a lightning rebel offensive that ended decades of iron-fisted Assad family rule in December 2024.
On Friday, the Interior Ministry said it had arrested Amjad Youssef over his alleged role in a 2013 attack on Tadamon that killed more than 228 people, including execution-style killings filmed on video, with many bodies later buried in mass graves.
Trials of senior officials in the Assad regime began in Damascus on Sunday.
Syrian Justice Minister Mazhar Al Wais said the court was ready for “the moment that victims have long waited for: the start of public trials”, calling them part of the “transitional justice process”.
