Syrian authorities said on Wednesday they had arrested a former military official accused of executing detainees at the infamous Saydnaya prison during the rule of former president Bashar al-Assad.
In a statement, the interior ministry said the Damascus province’s counter-terrorism 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 Saydnaya prison”, accusing him of being “directly responsible for carrying out the executions of detainees inside Saydnaya military prison… during his tenure as commander of the military police”.
The prison, outside Damascus, was one of the darkest elements of Assad family rule, which ended after more than five decades when Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by an Islamist-led offensive in December.
Rights group Amnesty International has called the facility a “human slaughterhouse”.
The Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison estimates that 30,000 people were taken into detention in the facility from 2011 onwards, while only around 6,000 have been released.
The others remain missing.
Diab Serriya, co-founder of the association, said that Abdullah was “the highest-ranked individual” to be arrested over Saydnaya 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 AFP.
In a post on Facebook, Serriya also said that Saydnaya’s so-called “salt rooms”, which “served as warehouses for storing bodies pending their transfer to mass graves”, were created during Abdullah’s tenure.
In 2022, through research and interviews with former inmates, AFP found that at least two such salt rooms were created inside Saydnaya.
More than 200,000 people have died in Syria’s prisons, including by execution and under torture, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.
bur-nad/dcp
© Agence France-Presse
