Activists in northern rural Homs said that the Assad regime’s security forces and shabiha militants have detained people who have newly returned to their homes in northern rural Homs. They said that those who have been detained have previously rejected the forced settlement agreements the Assad regime imposed on residents of the area and then returned to their homes.
Activists that the Assad regime security forces launched house-to-house raids in northern rural Homs searching for returnees from northern Syria and arrested the majority of them, while handing over others to the shabiha forces who demanded ransoms for their release.
Meanwhile, the Assad regime has recently begun sending lists of names of detainees who died under torture in its prisons to civil registers in Syrian cities and towns, citing heart attack and sudden hypotension as the cause of death of the detainees.
Assad’s intelligence services called on families of the detainees to obtain death certificates from civil registers and register the deaths of their family members.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent rights group, said in report issued earlier this week that at least 13,066 detainees, including 163 children and 43 women, have died under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime since March 2011. It said that the fate of 121,829 detainees is still unknown. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
