Syria rescuers end search for secret cells in Saydnaya prison

Rescue employees from the White Helmets say they’ve ended their search operation for potential detainees in secret cells or basements at Syria’s infamous Saydnaya army jail with out discovering anybody.

Specialised groups assisted by K9 canine models and people accustomed to the format combed the jail and its grounds on Monday, as crowds gathered within the hope of discovering their lacking kinfolk.

“The search did not uncover any unopened or hidden areas within the facility,” a White Helmets assertion mentioned.

The information got here as insurgent fighters mentioned that they had discovered nearly 40 our bodies displaying indicators of torture within the mortuary of a hospital within the capital, Damascus.

Meanwhile, the chief of the Islamist militant group whose offensive led to the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday mentioned former senior officers who oversaw the torture of political prisoners throughout the nation’s 13-year civil warfare can be held accountable.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani mentioned the names of the officers can be printed and repatriation sought for individuals who had fled to different nations. Rewards would even be provided to anybody who supplied details about their whereabouts, he added.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, says nearly 60,000 folks have been tortured and killed within the Assad authorities’s prisons.

Human rights teams say greater than 100,000 folks have disappeared since Assad ordered a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011 that triggered the civil warfare.

The Turkey-based Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) mentioned in a 2022 report that the jail “effectively became a death camp” after the beginning of the battle.

It estimated that greater than 30,000 detainees had both been executed or died because of torture, lack of medical care or hunger on the facility between 2011 and 2018.

It additionally cited launched inmates as saying that at the very least one other 500 detainees had been executed between 2018 and 2021.

ADMSP additionally described how “salt chambers” have been constructed to function primitive mortuaries to retailer our bodies earlier than they have been transferred to Tishreen Military Hospital in Damascus for registration and burial in graves on army land. The detainees’ households have been by no means given their our bodies, it mentioned.

Amnesty International used the phrase “human slaughterhouse” to explain Saydnaya and alleged that the executions had been authorised on the highest ranges of the Assad authorities, and that such practices amounted to warfare crimes and crimes towards humanity.

The Assad authorities dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “baseless” and “devoid of truth”, insisting that every one executions in Syria adopted due course of.