Amjad Yousef, who served as an intelligence officer before his arrest, was arrested by Syrian authorities due to his connection with a video that emerged in 2022, where he and some other people were seen murdering dozens of civilians during the Syrian civil war. He was known to be part of a gang called Branch 227, who was caught in Hama province after going into hiding for years. In the video, Yousef and his colleagues were seen shooting prisoners who were blindfolded and putting them in a trench. They later burned the bodies of the murdered prisoners in the Tadamon suburb of Damascus. The arrest has been received positively by American officials and the families of the victims as a milestone towards justice in post-Assad Syria.