Baladi - Monitors
Sixteen Syrian men and women have filed a criminal complaint in Austria against 24 senior officials in the government of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, for their involvement in their detention and torture, according to the Middle East Monitor.
The survivors, who include an Austrian citizen and two minors, were all held between February 2011 and July 2017 in 13 detention centres across Damascus, Daraa, Hama and Aleppo.
The allegations include torture as a crime against humanity and as a war crime committed by military intelligence, air force intelligence and general intelligence agencies.
The complaint describes dozens of forms of torture, including psychological abuse, sleep deprivation, being hung from the wrists and beaten, sexual abuse, having finger nails and facial hair forcibly removed, as well as being burned by cigarettes and electric shocks.
“There has definitely been a constant psychological torture, because the witnesses describe that they have been hearing the screaming of others who have been tortured constantly since they left,” Alexandra Lily Kather, an ECCHR ( European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights) lawyer who worked on the complaint, told MEMO.
One of the claimants was Ahmad Khalil, who was arrested by Syrian military intelligence after participating in peaceful protests against the Assad regime and was held in Damascus for three months. After being released, he identified more than 50 corpses in the “Caesar” photographs, a collection of more than 55,000 images of men, women and children killed by the Syrian government.
“As a survivor and a witness I see it as my duty to contribute to hold those who are responsible for the system of torture in Syria accountable.”
Only in 2017, at least 211 people were tortured to death, which prompts calls for a full UN-led investigation from human rights groups.
Source: MEMO