(Zaman Al Wasl)- Sednaya prison “executioners” forced a 70-year-old old man from the city of Darya, to grab his teeth and throw them in the toilet, and then put them in his mouth again before they beat him. Detainee Imad Abu Ras could not forget this scene along with other methods of torture and humiliation, some inflicted on him, and some he witnessed in the prison, which he called “the Syrian Bastille”.
Abu Ras, a 30-year-old banking graduate, was arrested on his way to Aleppo by Air Force Intelligence on 19 December 2012 from Hmeimim base. After spending the night in coastal Jibla city, he was taken the next day to the Juba Intelligence command of the coastal area in Latakia and remained there for 9 days, where he was interrogated for his participation in peaceful demonstrations in Aleppo at that time.
After being subjected to various kinds of torture, Abu Ras was transferred to the Air Force Intelligence branch in Homs, where he spent another 8 days during which he was also tortured before being transferred with two dissident officers and a civilian from the Ashrafia in Aleppo to the Mezzeh branch on 2 February 2013.
There, they were sorted, and Abu Ras was left in the interrogation section (the new building), which includes halls and terraces, greeted by a torture party before being placed inside a solitary cell with the number 8. Six days later, the investigation began again, accompanied by shabah: he was suspended in the ceiling of the room, raised from the ground about 30 centimeters, and under his feet, an electric heater was placed for at least half an hour until the soles of his foot began to melt.
The former detainee has spent three and a half months in the branch of Mezzeh Airport and was moved between five cells, the first and the third of which are group cells. He reported that the Mezzeh cells were 2.10m x 1m and comprised more than 14 detainees sometimes, while the group cells included about 110 detainees, most of them were from Darayya suburb, west of Damascus.
He said that the cells were dark and airless because they were underground, except for the heavy humidity and dirt, which led to many of the detainees to suffer dermatological diseases such as scabies and skin disorders.
He said that those who went out of solitary to be investigated did not return to them, unlike the prisoners of group cells who returned. Those who spend more than a year in detention are transferred to the halls and stands.
Abu Ras recalled some of the painful incidents he experienced inside the Air Force Intelligence Branch in Mezzeh, including the story of a detainee from Darayya named Imad al-Din al-Kuz, in his forties, married with children, and whose temperature rose and who started hallucinating. They tortured him then returned him to the cell in a state of unconsciousness and indifference towards the torture he received. The source added that the detainee began to speak to names of his family, and then began to defecate and was taken out of the cell. A few days later, one of the detainess who had gone out for investigation found his body in the airway, immersed in snow.
On May 11, 2013, Abu Ras was transferred to the Department of Military Prosecution in Mezzeh and was presented to the investigative judge, who referred him to the counter-terrorism court, to be then transferred to Sednaya for a new period of detention.
The situation in the Syrian Bastille prison differed completely from the prison of Mezzeh, where detainees are forbidden to speak, whisper or even sign or move inside the dormitory. There was no isolation of the convicted or lenience. They were subjected to daily individual and collective punishments, sometimes without specific timing.
Abu Ras confirmed that what was happening in Syria outside Saidnaya was applied to the detainees inside. When the Free Army advanced, especially in the battles of Palmyra, Homs and Al-Qusayr, the jailers increased their hatred, revenge and torture. The collective punishments were temperamental, while individual punishments involved the selection of three or more detainees from each dormitory to be tortured on a daily basis.
After 29 months spent in Saidnaya, he was transferred to Branch 285 of the General Intelligence Directorate in the capital's Kafr Sousa district and was collected with 270 other detainees there from all branches and prisons in Syria to the complete a prisoner exchange deal. On 12 December 2015, they were released in an exchange deal between the forces of the regime and the Syrian resistance.
Zaman Al Wasl
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