The family of American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in Syria four years ago, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Syrian government on Saturday, alleging that she had been assassinated on the orders of the high-ranking regime officials.

Colvin, a veteran journalist who had reported on conflicts across the globe, was killed by a military strike in the Syrian city of Homs in 2012. The 32-page lawsuit, which came after a four-year-long investigation by the Center for Justice and Accountability, an NGO that specializes in looking into human rights abuses and war crimes, argued that nine senior officials from the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, including Bashar’s brother Maher, had tracked and targeted Colvin’s movements and knew that the apartment building that Colvin was stationed at was home to several foreign journalists. It claims that the Assad regime intercepted communications from her apartment building. Colvin’s family believes that she was targeted because of her reporting on Assad’s indiscriminate airstrikes against civilians, and that the Assad regime hoped to stifle her voice. The New York Times explained more:

The lawsuit accuses nine Syrian officials, including the intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk and military officers in Homs, of developing and executing the strategy against journalists and activists. It details meetings in which an informant helped officials verify the location of the media center using phone-tracking data. It even contends that a pro-government militia leader, Khaled al-Fares, received “a black luxury car” three days after the deaths, as a reward.

The lawsuit is the first of its kind against the government since the war began. Foreign governments are usually immune from U.S. civil suits, but exceptions can be made for countries like Syria that are on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The Colvin family has requested monetary compensation, which could be provided from the U.S. government’s holdings of millions of dollars in frozen Syrian assets. At the time of her death, Colvin had been working with French photographer Remi Ochlik, who was killed in the same attack; no statements have been made from Ochlik’s family on the lawsuit.