Sick Syrian detainees were mistreated, beaten and sometimes thrown with the dead at the military hospital in Damascus where they were taken, according to a report published on Tuesday and testimonies collected by AFP.
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Entitled “Buried in Silence,” this report by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) paints a horrifying picture of the fate of prisoners admitted to the Techrine military hospital in the Syrian capital.
According to this report, based on interviews with 32 people, including former prisoners and medical professionals, sick prisoners were rarely treated and were subjected to “brutal torture” by security forces and even hospital staff.
The bodies of prisoners who died under torture or deplorable prison conditions were transferred to this hospital, where the causes of death were concealed, before being buried in “mass graves” near Damascus, according to the ADMSP.
“The prisoners were afraid to go to the hospital because many of them didn’t come back,” Abou Hamza, 43, a former prisoner who was hospitalized at the facility three times, told AFP.
“If any of us could walk, we were sent back to prison. Those who were very sick were left to their fate until they died in the part of the hospital reserved for prisoners,” adds Abou Hamza, who was imprisoned between 2012 and 2019.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), more than 100,000 people have died in the regime’s prisons since the uprising began in Syria in 2011, including under torture.
It is estimated that around 30,000 people have been imprisoned in the notorious Sednaya prison near Damascus since the revolt. The report covers the period between 2011 and 2020, but the authors believe that abuses continue.
“Torment”
Sick prisoners were housed in the hospital prison, where the bodies of deceased prisoners were also thrown. Sometimes “inmates teetered between life and death before a police officer finished them off,” according to the ADMSP.
“Once a prisoner seemed to be dying (…), they didn’t show him to the doctor, but put him among the corpses and let him die,” says Abou Hamza.
He then had to carry the prisoners’ numbered remains for hours, barefoot and in the freezing cold, before a photographer came to document the bodies.
In 2013, a former military police photographer known as “César” escaped with 55,000 photos of corpses tortured in regime prisons and military hospitals like that of Techrine.
The hospital issued death certificates citing heart attack, kidney failure or stroke as causes, but an autopsy was not performed, according to the report.
The ADSMP also documented “cruel torture of sick prisoners” by police officers in the hospital prison.
Some prisoners were also humiliated by “medical staff” and beaten by ordinary prisoners under the indifferent gaze of security officers, the report said.
According to the same source, police sometimes ordered an inmate in charge of the cell to get rid of sick inmates by strangling them with a towel or rag.
“Conscious politics”
“Techrine plays a central role in enforced disappearances, cover-ups of torture and falsification of causes of death that amount to war crimes,” said ADMSP co-founder Diab Serriya.
“What is happening in Techrine and other military hospitals is a deliberate policy,” he denounces.
Several legal cases have been launched in Europe against the Syrian regime, which is accused of torturing detainees and carrying out death sentences without trial.
In Germany, a military hospital doctor, Alaa Moussa, is on trial in Frankfurt on 18 counts of torturing opponents and murdering a prisoner by injection.
Mahmoud, 25, was arrested aged just 16 and beaten by inmates in the hospital prison without a security guard coming to his aid.
“They put me on the ground, stepped on me and covered my mouth with their hands until I (…) lost consciousness,” he told AFP. “I woke up among corpses in the corner of the cell.”
Two bodies lying on top of the teenager rolled to the ground and he began screaming in fear.
This former prisoner, suffering from tuberculosis, returned to Sednaya without a medical examination and lived in fear of being returned to Techrine. In prison, “my cellmates hid me in the toilets during the doctor’s appointment so they couldn’t take me to the hospital.”