A set of official documents classified as "Top Secret," which were first published in 2015, revealed a uniform and suspicious pattern in the deaths of dozens of detainees inside detention centers run by the General Secretariat of National Defense, a pro-Bashar al-Assad militia in Syria.
The documents, which consist of official correspondence from the Information Office of the General Secretariat of National Defense to the Military Justice Department in 2015, all share a similar conclusion regarding the fate of the detainees: "natural death due to myocardial infarction" (heart attack). This standardized diagnosis, applied to every case, contradicts numerous international human rights reports confirming that many detainees died as a result of systematic torture or the dire conditions in Syrian regime prisons.
The correspondence included the names of several detainees who died in custody, recording corpse numbers and dates of death. In one instance, the authorities responded by stating, "There is no communication with any of the families of the mentioned detainees for handover," pointing starkly to a policy of enforced disappearance.
These documents add a new layer of direct evidence that could be utilized by international justice mechanisms, such as the International Criminal Court, to bolster efforts for accountability and future prosecution of those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed within the Syrian regime's prison system.
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