Head of the Lebanese Movement for Change, Elie Mahfoud, on Sunday handed over a letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the issue of Lebanese detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime, nothing about whom has been known for more than 20 years.
The National Information Agency reported that the letter contained a list of the names and details of conditions of detention and forced detention in Syria since 1990.
“I am writing to call on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with all its organs and personnel working on the ground, to dispatch a commission of inquiry to the Syrian territories to try to disclose the fate of hundreds of Lebanese nationals who were detained by the Syrian forces inside Lebanon or in the Syrian territories,” the letter said.
The Lebanese official added: “Organizations concerned with the issue of missing persons and those who were forcibly disappeared and kidnapped in Syria have been able to establish a nearly accurate estimate of the number of Lebanese detainees in the Syrian prisons. They concluded that the number is about 622 detainees who are held in various prisons and detention centers.”
The letter said that the detainees are held in the prisons and detention centers in Sednaya, Tadmur, Mezzah, Damascus, Aleppo, Adra, Hama, Sweidaa, Homs, Palestine Branch, also known as Branch 235. Everyone who enters this branch is doomed, he added.
The letter also said that the Assad regime forces committed violations amounting to crimes against humanity when they were in Lebanon, the most horrible of which took place on October 13, 1990.”
Many Lebanese officials have already called on the Assad regime to disclose the fate of Lebanese nationals held in its prisons for more than 20 years during the Assad regime’s occupation of Lebanon, without getting any reply from the regime or its officials. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
