The Assad regime security apparatuses continue to kill detainees in its prisons as part of a series of war crimes that were confirmed by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria. Local news networks reported that the Assad regime issued new death certificates for detainees who died under torture in its prisons in Damascus.
Smart news network said that the wife of the detainee Ahmed Abdel Sattar Mansour received the death certificate for her husband after four years of detention during which he spent time in many prisons before he was taken to the notorious Sednaya prison where he was subjected to various methods of brutal torture.
The network indicated that the Assad regime’s military security detained Mansour from his workplace in one of the regime institutions in Homs city back in 2015. He was accused of participation in the revolutionary movement.
The Assad regime has recently begun sending death notices for victims of torture inside its detention centers to the civil registry departments in Syria’s provinces. The cause of death is usually attributed to natural reasons such as a “heart attack.”
Amnesty International earlier demanded that the Assad regime inform the relatives of the deceased of the circumstances of the enforced disappearances and deaths of their loved ones. In a report it issued in 2017 under the title “The Human Slaughterhouse,” the watchdog group said that the Assad regime executed more than 13,000 people in Sednaya Prison, the majority of whom were civilians opposed to the regime.
Another death certificate was issued for Mazen Silik from the town of Douma near Damascus who was detained in 2012. He was born in Douma in 1979 and is married with three children.
Local sources said that Silik was killed under torture while in the regime’s custody. He was detained at a checkpoint manned by militants of the Assad regime’s Republican Guard in Damascus.
Death certificates were also issued for two other young men from the town of Houla in northern rural Homs. They died under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime which detained them in the early days of the revolution.
In a report issued on June 26, 2018, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said that more than 13,000 people were killed under torture in Syria, the majority of whom were detained by regime forces.
The Assad regime refuses to disclose the fate of detainees in its prisons. Rights activists slammed the international community’s failure to exert pressure on the regime to force it to disclose the fate of hundreds of thousands of detainees and those forcibly disappeared in its prisons and release them as well as to hold it accountable for crimes against humanity. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)