Following the overthrow of ruler Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Islamist fighters say they have discovered dozens of bodies with signs of torture in a hospital.
One of the fighters, Mohammed al-Haj, told the AFP news agency on Monday that he had seen the remains of about 40 people in the morgue of a clinic near the capital Damascus on Monday.
When he opened the morgue, he was met with “a gruesome sight.” “About 40 bodies were piled up and showed signs of horrific torture,” the fighter said. AFP has seen dozens of photos and video recordings of corpses showing signs of torture: gouged eyes and missing teeth, blood spatter and bruises.
The bodies were wrapped in white sheets or placed in white plastic bags with names or numbers on them. Some of the dead were clothed, others were naked. Some of them had apparently been murdered recently. According to Haj, the bodies were taken to a hospital in Damascus so they could be identified by their relatives.
The regime placed political prisoners in the Sednaya Asylum
According to the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), the bodies are believed to be inmates of the infamous prison. When Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, he inherited from his late father Hafez al-Assad an apparatus of prisons and detention centers in which dissidents were locked up.
On Monday, thousands of people gathered outside Sednaya prison north of Damascus to search for relatives who had been imprisoned for years. The aid organization White Helmets wanted to look for possible secret doors or cellars in the prison.
Islamists want to release “all those wrongfully imprisoned.”
Islamist fighters led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia captured Damascus on Sunday. According to Russian state media, Assad fled to Russia. The fighters launched a surprise offensive in northwestern Syria on November 27 and advanced on the capital within a few days. The Islamists announced that “all those wrongly imprisoned” must be released.
Source: Krone
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