Syria denies State Department allegations

U.S. accuses military prison of mass killings.

BEIRUT — Syria on Tuesday rejected U.S. accusations that it carried out mass killings at a prison near Damascus and then burned the victims’ bodies in a crematorium, describing the allegations as “lies” and “fabrications.”

The allegations are a “new Hollywood plot” to justif y U.S. intervention in Syria, Syria’s Foreign Ministry said.

The State Department said Monday that it believes that 50 detainees are hanged each day at the Saydnaya military prison, a 45-minute drive north of Damascus.

Many of the bodies are then burned in the crematorium “to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place,” said Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East. He accused the governmen t of President Bashar Assad of sinking “to a new level of depravity.” Syria denied it. “The U.S. administration’s accusations against the Syrian government of a so-called crematorium in Saydnaya prison, in addition to the broken record about the use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons, are categorically false,” the Foreign Ministry said.

The allegation comes as the Trump administration is weighing its options in Syria, where an estimated 400,000 have been killed and half the population displaced by the 6-year-old civil war.

The U.S. Treasury Department said it has frozen any assets that five Syrian people and five Syrian companies may have in U.S. jurisdictions and has barred Americans from conducting any financial transactions with them, citing Syria’s “relentless attacks on civilians.”

Last month, the U.S. fired cruise missiles on a Syrian base after accusing Assad’s military of killing scores of civilians with a sarin-like nerve agent.

Western monitors and watchdog groups say they have accumulated evidence of mass killings in Syrian prisons, though there have not been any substantiated allegations of the use of a crematorium.

The State Department released commercial satellite photos showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photos, taken over several years starting in 2013, do not prove the building is a crematorium, but show construction consistent with such a facility.

The revelations echoed a February report by Amnesty International that said Syria’s military police hanged as many as 13,000 people in four years before removing bodies by the truckload for burial in mass graves.