Watch: 13,000 'secretly' hanged in Syrian prison

Beirut/Geneva - Amnesty says Syria executes, tortures thousands at prison; government denies

The Syrian government executed up to 13,000 prisoners in mass hangings and carried out systematic torture at a military jail near Damascus, rights watchdog Amnesty International said on Tuesday. The Syrian Justice Ministry denied the Amnesty report, calling it completely "devoid of truth", Syrian state news agency SANA reported late on Tuesday.

Amnesty said the executions took place between 2011 and 2015, but were probably still being carried out and amounted to war crimes. It called for a further investigation by the United Nations, which produced a report last year with similar accusations also based on extensive witness testimonies.

Syria's government and President Bashar Al Assad have rejected similar reports in the past of torture and extrajudicial killings in a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Amnesty report said an average of 20-50 people were hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison north of Damascus. Between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Sednaya in the four years after a popular uprising descended into war, it said.

"The victims are overwhelmingly civilians who are thought to oppose the government," the report said. "Many other detainees at Sednaya Military Prison have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine and medical care."

The prisoners, who included former military personnel suspected of disloyalty and people involved in unrest, underwent sham trials before military courts and were sometimes forced to make confessions under torture, Amnesty said.

SANA quoted the justice ministry as saying Amnesty's accusations were not based on real evidence but rather on "personal emotions aimed at achieving known political goals".

The ministry also accused rebel groups fighting to unseat Assad of executing and kidnapping civilians, SANA said.

The justice ministry described the report as an attempt at "harming Syria's reputation on the international stage especially after the victories of the Syrian army".

The army and allied forces drove rebel groups out of Aleppo city in December, in Assad's most important gain of the nearly six-year-old war.

Secrecy

The executions were carried out secretly and those killed were buried in mass graves outside the capital, with families not informed of their fate, Amnesty said.

The report was based on interviews with 84 witnesses including former guards and officials, detainees, judges and lawyers, as well as experts.

It followed a report issued a year ago by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, whose war crimes investigators said they had documented a high number of deaths in Sednaya military prison.

"Amnesty's findings are almost completely in-line with our 'Death in Detention' paper," Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the UN panel, told Reuters.

The foreign ministers of Britain and France decried Amnesty's findings. Britain's Boris Johnson tweeted: "Sickened by reports from Amnesty International on executions in Syria. Assad responsible for so many deaths and has no future as leader."

"@Amnesty has documented the horror in the prisons of the Syrian regime. This barbarity cannot be the future of Syria," said France's Jean-Marc Ayrault.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has visited selected government-run detention facilities since 2011, but its confidential findings are only shared with Syrian authorities.

"We only visit central prisons, which are under the Ministry of Interior," ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet said.

The ICRC has systematically requested "access to all detainees arrested by all parties to the conflict", she added.

Here are some of the accusations that have been made against the government of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

On July 3, 2012, US-based rights group Human Rights Watch said Syria was holding tens of thousands of detainees in a "torture archipelago". It documented 27 detention facilities across Syria it said were used to hold people swept up in the government's crackdown on protesters and carried out more than 200 interviews with former detainees, military and intelligence defectors.

"Almost all" described experiencing or witnessing torture, including "prolonged beatings, often with objects such as batons and wires", said HRW. Other methods included "holding the detainees in painful stress positions for prolonged periods of time, often with the use of specially devised equipment, the use of electricity, burning with car battery acid, sexual assault and humiliation, the pulling of fingernails, and mock execution."

The New York-based watchdog said detainees were also being held in stadiums, military bases, schools and hospitals. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says at least 60,000 people have died over five years from torture or harsh conditions in regime prisons. The Britain-based monitor says half a million people have passed through regime jails since the start of the conflict in March 2011.

In 2014, a former Syrian military photographer codenamed "Caesar" who defected, revealed 55,000 photos which gave a glimpse of some of the abuses being committed in Syrian jails. The digital images of 11,000 dead detainees showed emaciated bodies and "Caesar" described seeing corpses with "deep wounds and burns and strangulations".

On September 15, 2015, France launched an inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity carried out by Syria's regime, largely based on those pictures. And the UN General Assembly in December agreed to begin gathering evidence on war crimes in Syria as a first step towards prosecuting those responsible for atrocities there.

On February 8, 2016, a UN investigator told media in Geneva that "the mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the government of Syria is responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity." The deaths were the result of state policies that targeted the civilian population, the investigator said.

On August 18, 2016, Amnesty estimated that 17,700 people had died in regime prisons since the start of Syria's war. It cited prisoners who described "appalling abuse and inhuman conditions" in intelligence agency detention centres and in Saydnaya prison. Electrocution, scalding with boiling water and rape were among the forms of torture practised on a "large scale", the watchdog said.

In a February report titled "Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison", Amnesty said another 13,000 people had died in group executions there.

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