The Assad regime’s security agencies continue to murder detainees in their custody while lying about the causes of their deaths. The latest of the victims of torture are two brothers from the town of Kafarbatna in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta.
The local news network Smart Agency on Monday cited Majd Doghmosh, the brother of the victims, as saying that the Assad regime has recently given death notices for his brothers Muhannad and Mohammed to their family with heart attacks as the causes of death. He noted that the death notices listed May 2016 as the date of the death of Muhannad and June 2015 as the date of the death of his other brother Mohammed.
Doghmosh said that Mohammed was detained in 2014 when regime forces raided his house in Kafarbatna on accusation of “financing terrorism.” Muhannad was detained at a regime checkpoint while on his way back from Lebanon.
Mohammed was held in the notorious Sednaya Prison, his brother said, adding that they did not know in which prison Muhannad was detained or the charges issued against him.
In a report issued on late June, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said that tens of thousands of detainees have been killed under torture since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in 2011, noting that the overwhelming majority of those were killed in the detention centers of the Assad regime.
In the report marking the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Network said that at least 14,227 detainees were killed under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime, including 177 children and 62 women.
More than a year ago, the Assad regime’s security agencies begun sending “lists of death” to the civil registry departments in the Syrian provinces with heart attack as the cause of death. Rights activists slammed the international community’s failure to exert pressure on the Assad regime to force it to disclose their fate or release them or to hold the regime accountable for crimes against humanity. (Source: Syrian National Coalition’s Media Department)
