Local media quoted activists as saying that two young men from one family were killed under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime. The father of the two young men knew about their death when he checked with the civil registry department in Homs city.
Smart News Network quoted sources close to the family as saying that the civil registry department in Homs gave death notices for Kassem and Zakaria Tlass to their father when he visited the department to obtain identification papers.
The two young men were detained in 2011 a few days following the defection of officer Mohamed Tlass from Assad’s army, the sources said. Former detainees said that that they last saw Kassem alive in the 215th military intelligence branch in the district of Kafarsousa in Damascus.
The Assad regime continues to issue death notices for detainees who die in its prisons. Earlier this month, civil registry department in Swaida city issued death notices for eight detainees who died in the regime’s custody.
A few months ago, the Assad regime begun issuing death notices for detainees who died in its prisons, especially those who died under torture. It has been sending lists of names of the deceased to the civil registry departments across Syria with the death certificates saying that the deaths occurred due to natural causes.
In a report issued on June 26, 2018, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that it had registered the names of more than 13,000 people who died under torture in Syria, mostly at the hands of the Assad regime.
The Network said that at least 81,652 Syrian citizens have been forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime alone since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011.
Civilians and civil activists said that the international community is to blame for the staggering number of victims of torture in Syria as it failed to force the Assad regime to disclose the fate of the hundreds of thousands of detainees and those forcibly disappeared in its prisons.
The Syrian Coalition said that the Assad regime’s murder and torture of detainees must not go unpunished as it stressed that these crime will go down in history as war crimes and crimes against humanity. It called for activating the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) to hold accountable the perpetrators of war crimes in Syria. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
