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Syria’s new rulers have arrested the officer who, under President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, was responsible for issuing death sentences to inmates at the notorious Sednaya prison.
This is confirmed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (Sohr), according to the AFP news agency.
Sohr is based in the UK and follows the situation in Syria from there via a network of sources and activists.
The arrested military man, Mohammed Kanjo Hassan, is the highest-ranking officer so far to be arrested since Assad was ousted from power on December 8.
According to the Association of Prisoners and Missing Persons from Sednaya Prison, Kanjo Hassan headed a military court during the first three years of the war from 2011 to 2014.
He was then promoted to head of Syria’s military justice system.
When authorities moved in on Thursday night to try to arrest him, there were bloody clashes in Tartus province, located on the Mediterranean coast.
It is an area where support for President Assad has traditionally been high.
Here armed men tried to protect Kanjo Hassan from being arrested.
On the night of Thursday, Sohr stated that 14 men from the Syrian Ministry of the Interior had been killed and 10 others wounded during the operation.
President Bashar al-Assad fled Syria and into Russia as rebels advanced in a lightning offensive, capturing one major city after another and eventually taking control of the capital, Damascus.
Many leading figures from the fallen regime were left behind in Syria. This applies, among other things, to the ousted president’s brother, Maher al-Assad, who, according to sources, fled to Iraq before traveling from there to Russia.
Others of Assad’s henchmen are believed to have sought refuge in the cities where the Alawite minority is strong, including in Latakia and other cities on the coast.
The doors of Syria’s prisons were thrown wide open after rebel groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took control of Syria after a lightning offensive, sending former president Bashar al-Assad on the run.
This also applies to the Sednaya prison. In 2017, Amnesty International released a report calling the prison ‘a human slaughterhouse’ and ‘a death machine’.
According to the organization, at least 13,000 people were hanged in the prison between 2011 and 2015 after first experiencing torture, ill-treatment and generally ‘absolutely extreme conditions in the prison’. Most were civilians.
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Source: politiken.dk
