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Report: 13,000 hanged in Syrian prison
Rights group says Assad aides OK’d ‘monstrous’ killings
Amnesty International details mass executions at site known as “the slaughterhouse.”
BEIRUT — The Syrian prison was known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse.”
Behind its closed doors, the military police hanged as many of 13,000 people over the course of four years before carting out their bodies by the truckload for burial in mass graves, according to a report issued by Amnesty International.
The report, issued Tuesday, said that 20-50 people were hanged each week, sometimes twice a week, at the Saydnaya prison in what the organization called a “calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution.”
The report covers the period from the start of the March 2011 uprising to December 2015, when Amnesty says 5,000 to 13,000 people were hanged.
Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s regional office in Beirut, said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.
Amnesty said the killings were authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad.
“The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population,” Maalouf said.
“These executions take place after a sham trial that lasts over a minute or two minutes, but they are authorized by the highest levels of authority,” including the Grand Mufti, a top religious authority in Syria, and the defense minister.
There was no immediate comment from the Syrian government Tuesday.
Syrian government officials rarely comment on allegations of torture and mass killings.
In the past, they have denied reports of massacres documented by international human rights groups, describing them as propaganda.
The Amnesty report prompted a strong reaction from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who “was horrified about what was in the report,” according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
“We have repeatedly raised serious concerns about the grave violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law in Syria, including in detention centers and government-run prisons,” Dujarric told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York. “What is important is that there needs to be accountability for all the victims in this conflict.”
Amnesty had recorded at least 35 different methods of torture in Syria since the late 1980s, practices that only increased since 2011, Maalouf said.
Other rights groups have found evidence of widespread torture leading to death in Syrian detention facilities.
In a report last year, Amnesty found that more than 17,000 people have died of torture and illtreatment in custody across Syria since 2011, an average rate of more than 300 a month.
Those figures are comparable to battlefield deaths in Aleppo, one of the fiercest war zones in Syria, where 21,000 were killed across the province since 2011.
Saydnaya has become the main political prison in Syria since 2011, according to a former official interviewed by Amnesty.
A former guard said it held “the detainees of the revolution,” and a former judge said they were seen as “posing a real risk to the regime.”
The chilling accounts in Tuesday’s report came from interviews with 31 former detainees and over 50 other officials and experts, including former guards and judges.
Death in Saydnaya was always present, “like the air,” said former detainee Omar Alshogre, 21.
Alshogre survived nine months in Saydnaya before paying his way out in 2015 — a common practice.
He suffered from tuberculosis and his weight fell to 77 pounds.