Syrian authorities have said they had arrested a former military official accused of executing detainees at the notorious Sednaya prison during the rule of former President Bashar al-Assad.
In a statement on Wednesday, the interior ministry said the Damascus province’s counterterrorism branch arrested Major General Akram Salloum al-Abdullah.
It said he had held “several positions, most notably as Commander of the Military Police at the defence ministry between 2014 and 2015, during the rule of the former regime”.
The ministry stated that Abdullah was “implicated in committing serious violations against detainees in Sednaya prison”, accusing him of being “directly responsible for carrying out the executions of detainees inside Sednaya military prison … during his tenure as commander of the military police”.
‘Human slaughterhouse’
The prison, outside Damascus, was one of the darkest elements of the al-Assad family rule, which ended after more than 50 years when Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by an offensive in December.
Rights group Amnesty International has called the facility a “human slaughterhouse”.
A 2017 report by Amnesty said “murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination” had been widespread at the prison since 2011 when the country’s war broke out. The rights organisation found that these practices amount to crimes against humanity.
A 2014 report by Human Rights Watch corroborated accounts from former detainees of the prison about mass deaths at the facility.
The Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison estimates that 30,000 people were taken into detention in the facility from 2011 onwards, while only about 6,000 have been released.
The others remain missing.
Diab Serriya, cofounder of the association, said that Abdullah was “the highest-ranked individual” to be arrested over Sednaya to date.
Serriya said the military police was in charge of the prison, and that the period under Abdullah’s leadership saw many executions and acts of torture against prisoners.
“He is responsible for those crimes,” he told the AFP news agency.
In a post on Facebook, Serriya also said that Sednaya’s so-called “salt rooms”, which “served as warehouses for storing bodies pending their transfer to mass graves”, were created during Abdullah’s tenure.
According to Syria’s Civil Defence, the White Helmets, 50 to 100 people were executed daily inside the prison, which largely housed political prisoners who opposed al-Assad’s rule.
More than 200,000 people have died in Syria’s prisons, including by execution and under torture, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.
