Defector tells torture memos of Military Hospital in Damascus

(Reporting by Faris Al Rifai; Translation by Dani Murad)

(Zaman Alwasl)- For many years, even before the current conflict, torture and ill-treatment were consistently reported in regime’s prisons, and detainees were often held beyond the protection of law and with no access to the outside world, however, since the outbreak of protests in March 2011, cases of torture and arbitrary arrests have amounted to gruesome crimes against humanity.

According to the testimony of defector, non-commissioned officer "Abu Mayar al-Khabouri", who worked as head of the emergency department at Tishreen Military Hospital in Damascus, many horrific stories and detainees’ torture cases occurred in the hospital, when many prisoners were brought during the events of Sednaya prison, at the time when Brigadier-General "Hussein al-Ali” was appointed as the Deputy head of Sasa branch.

And according to Khabouri, at one time during the revolution, regime forces brought a young man named "Mohammed Hassan al-Dairi," and when he woke up from coma they asked him: “who shot you? “and he answered that soldiers at a checkpoint did that, and general brigader “al-Ali” was there accompanied by regime’s TV crew ready to film another fake video to claim that the prisoner’s injury was due to terrorists attack, however, al-Dairi refused to tell the story as they wanted, and ended up in prison without completing his treatment as a punishment for not cooperating.

in Jumat Al Ghadadb, in which Hamza al-Khateeb the child martyr was injured before being brought to prison with about 87 injured and more than 50 martyrs to the alternative emergency department in the hospital, and then all methods of torture were used on the wounded and among them was Hamza, whom his body was delivered later to his family, having been badly bruised, along with burn marks, and three gunshot wounds.

Upon arrival, intolerable physical and psychological pain was practiced on these detainees by air force and military intelligence forces, military police and detectives in addition to some pro-regime doctors and nurses in the hospital, and among those, the doctors : Colonel Moein Saleem, Lieutenant-Colonel Muhannad Zayoud, Captain Ahmed Hassan, and Nawar Saeed, as well as a large number of nurses such as, Yehia Zarifeh, salem Essa, Kherat Salhab, Shaban Nejmeh, Ibraheem Hassan, Ameer Maddi, Ghaith Dawood, Ahmed Hammoud, in addition to a solider from the detective department in the hospital and First-Sergeant Wissam Hassan, and others, he added.

Moreover, al-Khabouri also confirmed that detainees were routinely beaten, humiliated, and verbally abused for several hours by the guards, pointing out that at one time the biggest share of agony was for an old man in mid-eighties named "Mohammed al-Zubi," who was tortured to death because his body was so fragile and weak to bear the inhuman beating with the machine gun on his chest and head, while other prisoners were exposed to the worst kind of degradation , like in one incident , when some soldiers urinated on the wounded face to awaken him from anesthesia after a surgical procedure, as they claim.