As news of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria spread, Syrian children, the elderly, women and men sprint toward the exit of the infamous Sednaya Prison on the outskirts of Damascus.
Syrians are trying to find loved ones who disappeared during the 13-year civil war or the Assads’ half-century rule, many of whom were kept in the notorious prison.
According to Bloomberg, the Assads used the prison system to lock up political dissidents, from leftists to suspected Islamists.
On Sunday, rumours spread that thousands more inmates were imprisoned in underground cells that could not be reached.
The White Helmets, a volunteer organisation that operates in parts of opposition-controlled Syria and in Turkey and which for years has dug through fallen buildings after air strikes, deployed a team.
“They had a map from a defected Syrian army officer and broke down one wall and found nothing,” said one of the rescue workers. “They broke a second and found a door.”
However, no signs of more prisoners appeared.
‘Human slaughterhouse’
Dubbed as the “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International, the Sednaya Prison has become the epicentre of Syria’s unfolding tragedy.
Purported videos of those freed from Sednaya showed near-skeletal prisoners, who were barely able to give their names or say where they were from, reported Reuters.
Inside the solitary confinement cells, there was water and mud on the concrete floors. A single metal bowl for food was found there even as excrement lay around.
An individual, Mazen, told Reuters that Assad’s police had taken 10 of his relatives, including his uncle, his brother-in-law and siblings and cousins.
“We got a video here to a secret door. I gave it to the rescue workers. They are trying to dig, but they haven’t got anything yet.”
Bodies with signs of torture
Rebel fighters told AFP they found around 40 bodies bearing signs of torture inside a hospital morgue near Damascus.
“I opened the door of the morgue with my own hands; it was a horrific sight: about 40 bodies were piled up showing signs of gruesome torture,” Mohammed al-Hajj, a fighter with rebel factions from the country’s south, told AFP.
Diab Serriya, who co-founded the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) watchdog, told AFP that the bodies were likely of detainees from the Sednaya prison.
“Harasta Hospital served as the main centre for collecting the bodies of detainees,” he said. “Bodies would be sent there from Sednaya prison or Tishrin Hospital, and from Harasta, they would be transferred to mass graves.”
“It is very important to document what we are seeing in the video,” he added.
According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, at least 60,000 people have been killed under torture or because of terrible conditions in Assad’s detention centres.
