Sources close to French-Syrian dissident Mazen Dabbagh said that his family received a notice of his death and his son Patrick in one of the Assad regime’s prisons. On Thursday, their names surfaced in the death lists the Assad regime has been sending to civil registry departments across Syria to be registered as dead.
Mazen Dabbagh, 57, and his son Patrick, 20, are dual French and Syrian nationals. The air force intelligence arrested them in November 2013 for participating in a peaceful demonstration demanding the departure of the Assad regime.
In recent weeks, the Assad regime has begun sending lists of the names of detainees who died under torture in its prisons to local registration offices across Syria. Dubbed ‘death lists’ by human rights activists, the lists contained the names of thousands of victims of torture.
Dabbagh, a renowned faculty member at Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle – Damas, and his son has been forcibly disappeared since they were detained in 2013. Several newspapers reported their death, including Liberation newspaper which on Sunday said the Assad regime issued death notices for Mazen Dabbagh and his son Patrick.
According to the death notices, Mazen Dabbagh died on November 25, 2017, while his son Patrick died on January 21, 2014, a few weeks after his arrest.
In late 2016, a French court accepted a legal complaint from human rights groups accusing the Assad regime of war crimes and demanding the release of Dabbagh and his son.
After the French Public Prosecution initiated a preliminary investigation in October 2015, a Paris court tasked three judges with investigating enforced disappearance, genocide, and crimes against humanity in Syria.
Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch said that the Assad regime had to answer many questions about the death of detainees inside its prisons, casting doubt about the Assad regime’s claim that the victims had died of “heart attacks.”
The Syrian Coalition earlier called on the international community to launch serious, careful investigation into the war crimes taking place in the prisons of the Assad regime and refer those responsible to the International Criminal Court. (Source: Syrian Coalition + Al-Arabiya)
