In yet another prison, he counted 19 cellmates who died from disease, torture and neglect in a single month. As Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, closes in on victory over an eight-year revolt, a secret, industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his success. However, newly discovered government memos show that Syrian officials who report directly to Assad ordered mass detentions and knew of atrocities. Other memos report deaths of detainees, some later identified among photos of corpses smuggled out by a military police defector. “Justice is not a Syrian luxury,” Mazen Darwish, a Syrian human rights lawyer, said in Berlin, where he has assisted prosecutors.

Source: bd News24 May 12, 2019 12:00 UTC