WASHINGTON – U.S. prosecutors are accusing two senior Syrian officers of overseeing a infamous jail that tortured peaceful protesters and different political prisoners, together with a 26-year-old American lady who was later believed to have been executed.
The indictment was unsealed Monday, two days after a shock insurgent offensive overthrew Syrian President Bashar Assad. The U.S., U.N. and others accuse him of widespread human rights abuses in a 13-year battle to crush opposition forces looking for his elimination from energy.
The warfare, which started as a largely nonviolent common rebellion in 2011, has killed half one million folks.
The indictment, filed Nov. 18 in federal courtroom in Chicago, is believed to be the U.S. authorities’s first towards what officers say had been networks of Assad intelligence providers and navy branches and different allied teams that detained, tortured and killed hundreds of perceived enemies.
It names Jamil Hassan, director of the Syrian air power’s intelligence department, who prosecutors say oversaw a jail and torture heart on the Mezzeh air power base within the capital, Damascus, and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, who prosecutors say ran the jail.
The indictment costs the 2 with conspiring to commit merciless and inhuman remedy of civilian detainees in the course of the course of the Syrian civil warfare. Detainees on the jail had been whipped, kicked, electrocuted, burned and subjected to different psychological and bodily abuse, together with being housed in cells alongside corpses of useless detainees, prosecutors allege.
Victims included Syrians, Individuals and twin residents, the indictment stated. The U.S.-based Syrian Emergency Job Pressure has lengthy pushed federal prosecutors for motion on the circumstances, together with that of 26-year-old American support employee Layla Shweikani.
The group introduced witnesses who testified of Shweikani’s 2016 torture on the jail. Syrian rights teams consider she was later executed on the Saydnaya navy jail within the Damascus suburbs.
“Now it’s our time to seize these criminals and produce them to america for trial,” the Syrian Emergency Job Pressure stated in an announcement Monday. The group’s chief, Mouaz Moustafa, stated his family members had been amongst these tortured on the jail.
Federal prosecutors stated that they had issued arrest warrants for the 2 officers, who stay at giant.
Prospects of bringing them to trial had been unclear. Assad’s toppling by the rebels over the weekend has scattered his authorities and left residents searching prison torture centers across the nation for survivors and proof.
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