FORSSA, Finland — War in Syria and Iraq seems distant from the incongruously named Villa Eden Care, a glum former hotel now housing some 300 refugees on the edge of this tidy, snow-swept town of 18,000.
But the largest atrocity attributed to Islamic State fighters washed right up in Forssa this month. The local and national police swept in and detained two refugees, 23-year-old twin brothers from Iraq, suspected of shooting 11 people during the massacre of as many as 1,700 unarmed Iraqi Army recruits near Tikrit in June 2014.
As hundreds of thousands of refugees have marched their way onto Europe’s agenda this year, so, too, have fears that past, present and future jihadists are among them.
Even as security services confront evidence that some of the participants in the Paris attacks of Nov. 13 might have entered Europe via the migrant trail, and as they struggle to assess the threat from thousands of European citizens who have traveled to fight in Syria and then returned home, they are starting to encounter another issue: holding Europeans and non-Europeans to account for killings and other atrocities carried out on the battlefields of the Middle East.
Two recent cases in the northernmost reaches of Europe have highlighted the complexities of pursuing prosecutions in such cases, even when the authorities are aided by the penchant of Islamic State fighters to document their acts on camera.
Jari Raty, who heads the investigation of the brothers, said the two were suspected in 11 counts of “murder committed with terrorist intent.” The main evidence, he said, was a video showing at least part of the massacre at Camp Speicher, Saddam Hussein’s old palace complex outside Tikrit that was later used as an American Army base.
In the southern Swedish city of Goteborg this month, a court handed life sentences to two Swedish nationals found guilty of assisting in the beheading of two civilians in Syria in the summer of 2013, an act also caught on video. The video was discovered at the home of one of the men during a routine police search last summer, when he was a suspect in a fraud case, according to the prosecutor, Agnetha Hilding Qvarnstrom.
In both cases, assembling evidence is challenging and is hampered by the difficulty or impossibility of contacting witnesses. The legal process is made that much more complicated by questions about whether accusations involve war crimes, terrorism or crimes subject to national laws.
The Finnish police say the Iraqi brothers implicated in the massacre near Tikrit entered Finland in September, when refugees surged across central and northern Europe. More than 30,000 asylum seekers — many of them Iraqis, since Syrians tend to stop in neighboring Sweden — have arrived this year in Finland, a nation of 5.5 million.
Mr. Raty, a detective chief inspector with Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, said he first received a tip about a month ago to watch the Iraqi men, who were living in Forssa, about 50 miles southwest of Finland’s third-largest city, Tampere.
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The police watched the Iraqis for about three weeks, acting on information that had come from inside Finland, though not necessarily from Finns, Mr. Raty said in an interview at the Tampere police building, where he indicated that the brothers were being held.
In a spare office decorated with three pennants depicting the national flag and police organizations, Mr. Raty would say only that the police had used “tactical and technical means” to determine that they should detain the men.
While Finnish news reports have suggested that the Iraqis fell under suspicion from other refugees after an altercation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims at Villa Eden Care, no one in authority confirmed this. A woman involved in running the facility declined to comment, and no refugees there were willing to discuss the case.
The police told the district court that the twins should be held because of “probable grounds” that they had committed 11 terrorist-related killings.
Mr. Raty declined to give any details about the video, except to say that it was the key evidence for holding the Iraqis, and “there is no reason to doubt it is authentic.”
Kaarle Gummerus, a Tampere lawyer representing one of the brothers, said he had not seen the video. His client, he added, insisted that he was innocent, and was upset at being held at a facility where he could not smoke indoors.
Meetings with officials, lawyers, analysts and writers in Tampere, Forssa and the capital, Helsinki, suggested that Finland was carefully weighing how to handle the case. The authorities have offered no explanation as to why the Iraqi brothers came to Finland, but appear to suspect they might have been trying to flee prosecution by the Iraqi authorities.
One major question is whether, if Iraq requests extradition, Finland would even consider, as a member of the European Union, sending the brothers to a country with the death penalty.
The only trial held so far in Iraq in connection with the Camp Speicher massacre was in July and lasted just one day. Death sentences were handed down for 24 of the 28 defendants. They appeared in court in a giant cage, with relatives of the victims bursting in to hurl insults and objects at them. The sentences have not been carried out, and all of the convicted men are appealing.
In the Finnish case, there is another wrinkle: Rumors abound that the twins are identical, although neither Mr. Raty nor others involved in the case would confirm this. If so, it could prove close to impossible to prove which of them appears at points on the video or whether both of them do. The two appeared to be of slight build when they made their brief appearance in court on Dec. 11, their faces concealed under dark jackets pulled over their heads.
Finnish authorities say they are proceeding cautiously as they try to work their way through the legal issues that come from trying to prosecute, in a European justice system, an act that took place in the chaos of the Middle East.
“Looking at what is happening in the world today,” Mr. Raty said, “it is very possible that in the future there might be another of these kinds of incidents.”
So the police must take extra care on this case, he said, even as they navigate entirely new legal territory.
Gathering evidence is difficult at best, said Jarkko Sipila, head of crime reporting for MTV3, the Finnish channel that first reported the Iraqis’ arrests on Dec. 10.
“The main point is that these crimes happened in a place where the Finnish police has no access,” said Mr. Sipila, who is also a well-known crime novelist here.
The prosecutor in the Swedish case, Ms. Hilding Qvarnstrom, said the videos used to convict the two men were found on a USB stick in the home of one of the defendants, Al-Amin Sultan.
Both he and the other man, Hassan al-Mandlawi, had traveled to Syria in the spring of 2013. Mr. Sultan returned to Sweden later that year, while Mr. Mandlawi returned in early 2014 after being wounded in Syria and treated in Turkey, Ms. Hilding Qvarnstrom said.
Mr. Sultan’s lawyer, Mia Sandros, said her client denied that he was present at the beheading and would appeal. Mr. Mandlawi’s lawyer, Lars Salkola, said his client, who is in a wheelchair, had been unfit to stand trial and should be freed on appeal.
“He doesn’t remember anything from one moment to the next,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/25/world/europe/finland-iraq-refugees-isis.html?ref=world&_r=0
