1. Excessive Force and Physical Brutality During Arrest
While returning home in Marseille in the early morning, Majdi was abruptly ambushed and tackled by plainclothes individuals showing no immediate badges. Fearing a kidnapping attempt, he struggled before being subjected to severe physical assault: chokeholds, repeated facial strikes, and full-body trauma.
Medical examinations and official photographs included in the court file confirmed severe facial hematomas, bodily contusions, and bilateral subconjunctival hemorrhages, leading his legal counsel to file an official criminal complaint for police brutality.
2. Tactical Docket-Flooding to Prolong Pre-Trial Detention
French criminal procedure imposes strict statutory ceilings on pre-trial detention. To circumvent these limits and justify keeping a foreign researcher with no prior criminal record behind bars, investigative authorities flooded the case docket with thousands of Arabic pages entirely unrelated to the case.
3. Political Interrogation Bias & Anachronistic Witnesses
- Interrogations on Military Defection: On over ten occasions, the examining magistrate questioned Nema regarding why he chose to defect from Bashar al-Assad's army in 2012, prompting defense counsel to formally challenge this overtly politicized line of questioning.
- Chronologically Impossible Testimonies: The prosecution cited an individual claiming to have seen Nema in Ghouta in 2015, a claim disproven by official border logs and academic registries confirming his continuous residence in Istanbul since May 2013[cite: 14].
- Guilt by Association: Deprived of direct war crimes and kidnapping charges by the Court of Cassation[cite: 11, 16], prosecutors shifted to "conspiracy to prepare offenses," effectively criminalizing remote media spokesperson activities performed thousands of miles away[cite: 13, 14].
4. Prolonged Solitary Confinement & Denial of Family Access
For the first ten months of custody, Majdi was denied any form of contact with his parents and siblings. Detained for over five years without a single family visit due to visa denials for his relatives, he undertook an open-ended hunger strike in November 2024 to protest systematic strip-searches and denial of specialized medical care.