At least 13,000 people have been reportedly hanged in a span of five years at a Syrian government prison near Damascus, the Amnesty International said on Tuesday.
The non-governmental human rights organisation accused the Syrian regime of a "policy of extermination," as it issued a report titled "Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison. The report has been made based on interviews from around 84 witnesses, including detainees, judges, and guards.
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The Amnesty report found that groups of 50 people were taken out of prison cells at least once a week betwen 2011 and 2015 for arbitrary trials and then were beaten and hanged "in the middle of the night in total secrecy."
"Throughout this process, they remain blindfolded. They do not know when or how they will die until the noose was placed around their necks," the rights group wrote in the report. The report also stated that most of the victims of the hangings were civilians who were believed to be opposed to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
"They kept them (hanging) there for 10 to 15 minutes. For the young ones, their weight wouldn't kill them. The officers' assistants would pull them down and break their necks," a former judge who witnessed the executions said, according to Agence France Press.
Amnesty said that the practices in the notorious government prison amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, but are still taking place in the country. Reports state that thousands of prisoners are held in the military-run Saydnaya prison, which is about 30 kilometres north of Damascus. The human rights organisation also accused the Syrian government of repeatedly torturing the detainees and withholding food, water and basic medical care.
The report also stated that prisoners in the prison were raped and also forced to rape each other. The guards in the prison fed the inmates by tossing food on the floor which was dirty and covered with grime and blood.
"The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population," Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's Beirut office was quoted as saying by AFP.
"The cold-blooded killing of thousands of defenceless prisoners, along with the carefully crafted and systematic programmes of psychological and physical torture that are in place inside Saydnaya Prison cannot be allowed to continue," she added.
