Assad regime deliberately targeted journalist Marie Colvin, sister says

In court documents unsealed Monday, a former Syrian intelligence agent turned defector says that the government "regularly monitored television news broadcasts and newspaper articles," and a top intelligence official "wanted to learn their location and take the necessary measures to stop them from reporting."

The defector alleges that an informant told the government about Colvin's location the night before the reporter for Britain's Sunday Times was killed. She died in a rocket attack during the siege of Homs, the day after a telephone interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper; she said that the Syrian war was "the worst" conflict she had ever covered.

Her sister Cat Colvin first filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Syrian government in a Washington, DC, court in 2016. She and her lawyer are now asking the judge for a default judgment -- a win by default, because the Syrian government has not showed up to defend the case.

"If I could throw Assad in prison, that's what I would do," Cat Colvin told Christiane Amanpour in an interview airing Tuesday.

Short of that, she said, "I think that every penny I can get out of the Assad regime is less that they can spend on barrel bombs and chemical weapons."

Colvin is asking for compensation for lost earnings, grief compensation and punitive damages.

"The regime meticulously planned and carried out this rocket attack on the media center," Scott Gilmore, a lead lawyer in the case, told Amanpour.

They acknowledge that getting money from the Assad regime is unlikely, but they hope that their case can help establish evidence of a "chain of command" to be used in a possible future war crimes trial.

Gilmore said that years of meticulous investigation led him and his team to the defector, code-named "Ulysses" in court documents.

"What he revealed was really that from the moment that Marie, Paul Conroy and other journalists -- Arwa Damon from CNN, Paul Wood from the BBC -- as they were arriving in Lebanon, there were intelligence sources tracking their movements."

"All of that was being channeled to the military and security officials that were overseeing the armed operations in Homs, with specific instructions that the intelligence forces were to track them down and capture them if possible or otherwise kill them."

The Syrian government did not respond to CNN's request for comment on the case, but has previously denied targeting journalists.

"The army forces didn't know that Marie Colvin existed somewhere because before that we hadn't known about Marie Colvin," Bashar al-Assad told NBC in a 2016 interview.

Cat Colvin said that she still thinks of her sister every day.

"I've become much more angry about the silencing of journalists and the ongoing bombing of civilians. I really thought Marie's death would be sort of a watershed event, and the world would take notice, or the US government would find the targeting and murder of an American citizen intolerable."

"But none of that happened."