Assad regime uses jail for mass murder - US
SYRIA: The Syrian regime burnt the bodies of thousands of prisoners outside a notorious jail in an effort to conceal the extent of its killing, the top United States diplomat for the Middle East has revealed.
The corpses were incinerated in a newly built crematorium next to Sednaya prison outside the capital, Damascus, in order to ‘‘manage’’ the numbers and destroy the evidence, Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said yesterday.
‘‘We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison.’’
The department released newly declassified photographs showing what it said was an outbuilding in the complex that it believed was modified in 2013 to support the crematorium.
Presenting the satellite images, Jones said Syrian President Bashar al-assad’s government ‘‘has sunk to a new level of depravity’’ with the support of allies Russia and Iran.
He estimated that as many as 117,000 people had been detained in Syrian prisons since the beginning of the uprising against Assad’s regime in 2011. As many as 70 inmates were being kept in cells designed for no more than five people. Jones said the information came from credible human rights groups, non-governmental sources and intelligence assessments.
In a recent report, Amnesty International called the Sednaya prison a ‘‘human slaughterhouse’’, claiming that every week and often twice a week between 2011 and 2015, groups of up to 50 prisoners were taken out of their cells and executed.
In five years, as many as 13,000 people, most of them civilians believed to be opposed to the government, were hanged in secret and without trial, Amnesty said.
In 2014, tens of thousands of images of dead prisoners taken by a military defector, code-named Caesar, were published to an international outcry. The victims bore the signs of starvation and torture, including gouged-out eyes, cigarette burns and broken limbs.
Jones, in a special state department briefing, called on Russia to take action. He said Moscow had ‘‘either aided in or passively looked away’’ as the regime had engaged in years of ‘‘mass murders’’ and other atrocities, including extensive bombing of hospitals and the use of chemical weapons on both civilians and rebel forces.
Jones said the US had ‘‘reason to be skeptical’’ about a deal to set up ‘‘de-escalation zones’’ brokered by Russia during ceasefire discussions last week. - Telegraph Group