More than 1,000 Syrians died in a prison set up inside a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus.
They were executed, tortured to death or left to starve to death, in a location known for its atrocities, which had aroused widespread public fear.
All of this is part of a report published on Thursday, which investigated the motives behind the deaths of people whose bodies were found in seven different graves.
According to the report by the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability, obtained exclusively by the Reuters news agency, the graves were found using a combination of eyewitness accounts, satellite images and documents photographed at the military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, in Mezzeh, after the overthrow of former President Bashar al-Assad in December.
Some of the burial sites were at the airport. Others were beyond Damascus.
Reuters has not reviewed the documents and has not yet been able to independently confirm the existence of mass graves through satellite imagery. But images of many of the locations marked by the organization showed signs of excavations in the ground.
Two of the sites, one at the airport and another at a cemetery in Najha, show clear signs of entire dug trenches that match the period when the evidence was taken by the organization.
Shadi Haroun, one of the authors of the report, said he was among those held in detention. He was held there for several months from 2011 to 2012 on charges of organizing protests. According to Mr. Haroun, he was interrogated daily, tortured physically and psychologically, and asked to confess to things he had not done.
Deaths came in many forms, he told Reuters.
Although the detainees could see nothing but the walls of their cell or the room where they were being interrogated, they could hear "gunshots every two days."
Injuries caused by torture were another reason why prisoners lost their lives.
“A small wound on the leg of one of the detainees, caused by a whip, was left unsterilized and untreated for days. Gradually the wound turned into gangrene and his condition deteriorated until it reached the point where his entire leg had to be amputated,” said Mr. Haroun, describing the plight of one of his fellow inmates with whom he shared a cell.
Likewise, the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability and the Association for Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison interviewed 156 survivors and eight former members of air force intelligence, the Syrian security service tasked with surveillance, imprisonment, and assassination of regime critics.
The new government has issued a decree banning former regime officials from speaking publicly and has not designated anyone to comment on the report's findings. /VOA (A2 Televizion)
A2 CNN Livestream
MUND TE LEXONI GJITHASHTU
