By Samuel Oyejola
As the crisis in Syria rage on the world leaders seat to provide workable end to the protracted crisis as Amnesty International alleged extra judicial killing in Saydnaya a Christian suburb in the war torn country
According to the human right group there are evidences that Prisoners, mostly civilians, suffer torture, beatings, starvation, and water deprivation.
According to the report titled “Syria: Human slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria” the Syrian authorities have quietly and methodically organized the killing of thousands of people in their custody.
Amnesty International revealed that, “On any given week, dozens are sentenced suddenly in sham military trials and executed without notice or justice or even the chance to say goodbye to their families. Their lifeless bodies are taken away by the truckload to be secretly buried in mass graves. Their families are given no information about their fate.
The group said that it is working to put pressure on the Syrian government to abide by international human rights law.
The human right organisation revealed that, as many as 13,000 people have been hanged in secret, “we have no reason to believe the horrors have stopped since,” the report says.
Amnesty investigation revealed that prior to their execution, victims face what the Syrian authorities call a “trial” at the Military Field Court, a one or two-minute procedure in an office, in front of a military officer, where effectively the detainee’s name is logged into a death registry.
On the day of the execution, which prison guards refer to as “the party”, they collect those who will be executed from their cells in the afternoon. The authorities inform the detainees they will be transferred to one of the civilian prisons, which many believe have much better conditions. They are instead brought to a cell in the basement of the building, where they are severely beaten.
According to a former prison guard who described how the detainees are severely beaten throughout the night before being driven to what the report described as execution room.
The report revealed that the execution room at Saydnaya was expanded after June 2012, so that more people could be executed at once. Nooses line the wall. On entry to the room, the victims are blindfolded, and do not know that they are about to be killed. They are then asked to place their fingerprints on statements documenting their death. Finally they are taken, still blindfolded, to concrete platforms, and hanged. They do not know how or when the execution will be carried out until the nooses are placed around their necks.
Detainees held in the building in the floors above the execution room reported that they sometimes heard the sounds of these hangings.
According to another human right group that corroborated the Amnesty report, Syrian Network for Human Rights, 75,000 people have been arrested by government security forces and are now missing while eleven million people have been forced to leave their homes in the country raved by crisis.
The Syrian crisis remains the longest crisis of the Arab Spring and there have been various reports of human rights abuses by the government, rebel fighters and the ISIS.
