Mouaz Moustafa, the chief director of the Syrian Emergency Job Drive, an advocacy group, stated that an indictment would ship an plain message. “Nobody ought to normalize relations with a regime that has killed an estimated 500,000 to one million folks, together with Individuals and Europeans, and that continues to take action,” he stated.
Requested to remark for this text or whether or not the F.B.I. had reached out, Ms. Shweikani’s father, Mohamed Shweikani, stated, “I need nothing to do with working your story or the F.B.I.”
Spokeswomen for the Justice Division and the F.B.I. declined to remark.
As a baby, Ms. Shweikani traveled to Syria to see household, and he or she earned a pc science diploma in 2012 from Arab Worldwide College, in keeping with her LinkedIn account. After working for a number of years as a software program engineer, she relocated in 2015 from suburban Chicago to Damascus to affix a grass-roots community of humanitarian reduction staff. However Mr. al-Assad tightly controls all official assist efforts in his nation and he has handled citizen-run efforts as a menace, accusing them of terrorism.
By the point the authorities detained Ms. Shweikani on Feb. 19, 2016, alongside together with her father and her fiancé, who had been additionally within the nation, virtually each member of her reduction group had been taken into Syrian custody. She would spend practically a yr in prisons on the outskirts of Damascus the place cramped circumstances, sickness and torture run rampant: a detention facility on the Mezze airport, the Adra civilian jail and the Saydnaya navy jail, the place witnesses imagine she was tried and executed.
Syrian guards tortured Ms. Shweikani, witnesses would later inform Justice Division investigators, recounting how they vowed to kill her father and fiancé, who had been detained for only some days. The guards ultimately pressured her to falsely confess to crimes in opposition to the state, together with terrorism.
