Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Amnesty International says Saydnaya prison may hold between 10,000 and 20,000 people

As many as 13,000 people, most of them civilian opposition supporters, have been executed in secret at a prison in Syria, Amnesty International says.

A new report by the human rights group alleges that mass hangings took place every week at Saydnaya prison between September 2011 and December 2015.

Amnesty says the alleged executions were authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government.

The government has previously denied killing or mistreating detainees.

However, UN human rights experts said a year ago that witness accounts and documentary evidence strongly suggested that tens of thousands of people were being detained and that "deaths on a massive scale" were occurring in custody.

Amnesty interviewed 84 people, including former guards, detainees and officials at Saydnaya prison for its report.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Thousands hanged at Saydnaya prison, Amnesty report says

It alleges that every week, and often twice a week, groups of between 20 and 50 people were executed in total secrecy at the facility, just north of Damascus.

Before their execution, detainees were brought before a "military field court" in the capital's Qaboun district for "trials" lasting between one and three minutes, the report says.

A former military court judge quoted by Amnesty said detainees would be asked if they had committed crimes alleged to have taken place. "Whether the answer is 'yes' or 'no', he will be convicted... This court has no relation with the rule of law," he said.

According to the report, detainees were told on the day of the hangings that they would be transferred to a civilian prison then taken to a basement cell and beaten over the course of two or three hours.

Image copyright Amnesty International Image caption Former detainee Omar al-Shogre before his arrest and shortly after his release from Saydnaya

Then in the middle of the night they were blindfolded and moved to another part of the prison, where they were taken into a room in the basement and told they had been sentenced to death just minutes before nooses were placed around their necks, the report adds.

The bodies of those killed were allegedly then loaded onto lorries, and transferred to Tishreen military hospital in Damascus for registration and burial in mass graves located on military land.

On the basis of evidence of the testimony of its witnesses, Amnesty estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Saydnaya over five years.

Witness accounts

A former judge who saw the hangings:

"They kept them [hanging] there for 10 to 15 minutes. Some didn't die because they are light. For the young ones, their weight wouldn't kill them. The officers' assistants would pull them down and break their necks."

'Hamid', a former military officer who was detained at Saydnaya:

"If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling. This would last around 10 minutes… We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then."

Former detainee 'Sameer' describes alleged abuse:

"The beating was so intense. It was as if you had a nail, and you were trying again and again to beat it into a rock. It was impossible, but they just kept going. I was wishing they would just cut off my legs instead of beating them any more."

Source: Amnesty International

Although it does not have evidence of executions taking place since December 2015, the group says it has no reason to believe they have stopped and that thousands more were likely to have died.

Amnesty says these practices amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It also notes that death sentences have to be approved by the grand mufti and by either the defence minister or the army's chief of staff, who are deputised to act on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.

The human rights group says it contacted the Syrian authorities about the allegations in early January but has received no response.

Last August, Amnesty reported that an estimated 17,723 people had died in custody as a result of torture and the deprivation of food, water and medical care between March 2011 - when the uprising against President Assad began - and December 2015. That figure did not include those allegedly hanged at Saydnaya.</s>Syrian authorities have killed at least 13,000 people since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as "the slaughterhouse," Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday. It covers the period from 2011 to 2015, when Amnesty said 20-50 people were hanged each week at Saydnaya Prison in killings authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad, and carried out by military police.

Start the conversation, or Read more at HeraldNet.</s>Lynn Maalouf, deputy director of research at Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, Feb. 6, 2017. Amnesty International says Syrian authorities killed at least 13,000 people in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as the “slaughterhouse.” The group released a report covering the period from the start of the 2011 uprising until 2015, during which Amnesty says groups of 20 to 50 people were hanged at Saydnaya Prison, once or twice a week, in killings authorized by senior officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

COMBO - In this combination of two photos of Omar Alshogre, a 21-year Syrian former detainee, now living in Stockholm, Sweden. The left picture is of Alshogre taken on January 2017 in Stockholm, Sweden. The right picture is of Alshogre in July 2015 in Antakya, Turkey, a month after he got out of Syria's Saydnaya prison, near Damascus. While in detention, Alshogre said he heard men escorted to be hanged and had himself been called for "execution" but was spared after a brief trial. Amnesty published a new report on Tuesday revealing that as many as 13,000 men were hanged in secret in a Syrian prison between 2011 and 2015, as part of a government campaign of extrajudicial executions. The group says for five years, once or twice weekly, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their prison cells and hanged to death. (Handout by Omar Alshogre via AP)

BEIRUT — The prison north of Damascus was known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse” and in it, as many of 13,000 people were hanged in only four years after a series of sham trials, according to a new report issued by Amnesty International.

The report, issued on Tuesday, said that 20-50 people were hanged each week at the Saydnaya prison in what the organization called a “calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution.”

The report covers the period from 2011 to 2015, but Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s regional office in Beirut, said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.

“These executions take place after a sham trial that lasts over a minute or two minutes, but they are authorized by the highest levels of authority,” including the Grand Mufti, a top religious authority in Syria, and the defence minister, she said.

The killings were authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad, and carried out by military police. Amnesty has also recorded at least 35 different methods of torture in Syria since the late 1980s, practices that only increased since 2011, Maalouf said.

Other rights groups have found evidence of massive torture leading to death in Syrian detention facilities. In a report last year, Amnesty found that more than 17,000 people have died of torture and ill-treatment in custody across Syria since 2011, an average rate of more than 300 deaths a month.

Those figures are comparable to battlefield deaths in Aleppo, one of the fiercest war zones in Syria, where 21,000 were killed across the province since 2011.

“The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population,” Maalouf said.

Syrian government officials rarely comment on allegations of torture and mass killings. In the past, they have denied reports of massacres documented by international human rights groups, describing them as propaganda.

The chilling accounts in Tuesday’s report came from interviews with 31 former detainees and over 50 other officials and experts, including former guards and judges.

According to the findings, detainees were told they would be transferred to civilian detention centres but were taken instead to another building in the facility and hanged.

“They walked in the ’train,’ so they had their heads down and were trying to catch the shirt of the person in front of them. The first time I saw them, I was horrified. They were being taken to the slaughterhouse,” Hamid, a former detainee, told Amnesty.

Another former detainee, Omar Alshogre, told The Associated Press the guards would come to his cell, sometimes three times a week, and call out detainees by name.

Alshogre said a torture session would begin before midnight in nearby chambers that he could hear.

“Then the sound would stop, and we would hear a big vehicle come and take them away,” said Alshogre, who spent nine months in Saydnaya. Now 21, he lives in Sweden.

Speaking in an interview from Stockholm via Skype, Alshogre described how he was forced to keep his eyes closed and his back to the guards while they abused or suffocated a cellmate.

The body often would be left behind, or there would be a pool of blood in the cell for other prisoners to clean up.

“We can tell from the sound of the prisoner as he dies behind us. He dies a meter away. I don’t see anything, but I see with my ears,” said Alshogre, who at age 17 moved among nearly 10 detention facilities in Syria for two years before he was taken to Saydnaya.

Alshogre survived nine months in the prison, paying his way out in 2015 — a common practice. He suffered from tuberculosis and his weight fell to 35 kilograms (77 pounds).

Two cousins detained with him in western Syria didn’t survive, dying a year apart in a military intelligence detention facility. The younger one died in Alshogre’s arms, deprived of food and so weak he was unable to walk to the bathroom on his own.

Still, Alshogre said nothing could have prepared him for Saydnaya.

At one point, Alshogre was called out by his guards “for execution,” he said. He was brought before a military trial and told not to raise his gaze at the judge, who asked him how many soldiers he had killed.

When he said none, the judge spared him.

Death in Saydnaya was always present, “like the air,” Alshogre said.

Once when he was deprived of food for two days, a cellmate handed him his food ration — and died days later.

“This is someone who gave me his life,” he said. Another cellmate died of diarrhea, also common in the prison.

“Death is the simplest thing. It was the most hoped for because it would have spared us a lot: hunger, thirst, fear, pain, cold, thinking,” he added.

“Thinking was so hard. It could also kill,” said Alshogre, who keeps a photo of one of his tormentors on the wall of his home.</s>Beirut: As many as 13,000 people were hanged in five years at a notorious Syrian government prison near Damascus, Amnesty International said Tuesday, accusing the regime of a "policy of extermination."

In a report on Saydnaya prison based on interviews with 84 witnesses, the rights group found that at least once a week between 2011 and 2015, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their prison cells for arbitrary trials, beaten, then hanged "in the middle of the night and in total secrecy".

Syria regime hanged 13,000 in notorious prison: Amnesty was posted in World of TheNews International - https://www.thenews.com.pk on February 07, 2017 and was last updated on February 07, 2017. This news story is related to Latest/184606-Syria-regime-hanged-13000-in-notorious-prison-Amnesty/ - breaking news, latest news, pakistan ne. Permanent link to the news story "Syria regime hanged 13,000 in notorious prison: Amnesty" is https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/184606-Syria-regime-hanged-13000-in-notorious-prison-Amnesty.</s>BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian authorities have killed at least 13,000 people since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as "the slaughterhouse," Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday.

It covers the period from 2011 to 2015, when Amnesty said 20-50 people were hanged each week at Saydnaya Prison in killings authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad, and carried out by military police.

The report referred to the killings as a "calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution."

Amnesty has recorded at least 35 different methods of torture in Syria since the late 1980s, practices that only increased since 2011, said Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's regional office in Beirut.

Other rights groups have found evidence of massive torture leading to death in Syrian detention facilities. In a report last year, Amnesty found that more than 17,000 people have died of torture and ill-treatment in custody across Syria since 2011, an average rate of more than 300 deaths a month.

Those figures are comparable to battlefield deaths in Aleppo, one of the fiercest war zones in Syria, where 21,000 were killed in the province since 2011.

"The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population," Maalouf said.

While the most recent data is from 2015, Maalouf said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.</s>As many as 13,000 people were hanged in five years at a notorious Syrian prison near Damascus, Amnesty International has said, accusing the government of a “policy of extermination”.

Titled “Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison,” Amnesty’s damning report, released on Tuesday, is based on interviews with 84 witnesses, including guards, detainees, and judges.

It found that at least once a week between 2011 and 2015, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their prison cells for arbitrary trials, beaten, then hanged “in the middle of the night and 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 report said.

Most of the victims were civilians believed to be opposed to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“They kept them [hanging]there for 10 to 15 minutes,” a former judge who witnessed the executions said.

“For the young ones, their weight wouldn’t kill them. The officers’ assistants would pull them down and break their necks,” he said.

Amnesty said the practices amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and were likely still taking place.

Thousands of prisoners are held in the military-run Saydnaya prison, one of the country’s largest detention centres located 30 km north of Damascus.

Amnesty accused the Syrian government of carrying out a “policy of extermination”, repeatedly torturing detainees and withholding food, water, and medical care.

Prisoners were also raped or forced to rape each other, and guards would feed detainees by tossing meals onto the cell floor, which was often covered in dirt and blood, the report said.

A twisted set of “special rules” governed the facility: detainees were not allowed to speak and must assume certain positions when guards entered their cells.

“Every day there would be two or three dead people in our wing… I remember the guard would ask how many we had. He would say, ‘Room number one – how many? Room number two – how many?’ and on and on,” said Nader, a former detainee whose name has been changed.

After one fierce day of beating, Nader said, 13 people died in a single wing of the prison.

One former military officer said he could hear “gurgling” as people were hanged in an execution room below.

“If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling,” said Hamid, who was arrested in 2011.

“We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then,” he told Amnesty.

According to the report, the bodies were taken away by the truckload to be secretly buried in mass graves. Their families were given no information about their fate.

Amnesty has previously said that more than 17,700 people were estimated to have died in government custody across Syria since the country’s conflict erupted in 2011.

The figure of 13,000 deaths in a single prison, therefore, is a marked increase.

“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,” said Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s Beirut office.

“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 said.

A probe by the UN last year accused Assad’s government of a policy of “extermination” in its jails.

The UN estimates that more than 400,000 people have been killed and millions have fled their homes since the conflict began with anti-Assad protests.</s>BEIRUT – The Syrian prison was known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse.” Behind its closed doors, the military police hanged as many of 13,000 people over the course of four years before carting out their bodies by the truckload for burial in mass graves, according to a new report issued by Amnesty International.

The report, issued on Tuesday, said that 20-50 people were hanged each week, sometimes twice a week, at the Saydnaya prison in what the organization called a “calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution.”

The report covers the period from the start of the March 2011 uprising to December 2015, when Amnesty says between 5,000 and 13,000 people were hanged.

Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s regional office in Beirut, said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.

Amnesty said the killings were authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad.

“The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population,” Maalouf said.

“These executions take place after a sham trial that lasts over a minute or two minutes, but they are authorized by the highest levels of authority,” including the Grand Mufti, a top religious authority in Syria, and the defense minister.

There was no immediate comment from the Syrian government on Tuesday, and Amnesty said Damascus didn’t respond to its own letter seeking comment. Syrian government officials rarely comment on allegations of torture and mass killings. In the past, they have denied reports of massacres documented by international human rights groups, describing them as propaganda.

The Amnesty report prompted a strong reaction from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who, “was horrified about what was in the report,” according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

“We have repeatedly raised serious concerns about the grave violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law in Syria, including in detention centers and government-run prisons,” Dujarric told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York. “What is important is that there needs to be accountability for all the victims in this conflict.”

Amnesty had recorded at least 35 different methods of torture in Syria since the late 1980s, practices that only increased since 2011, Maalouf said.

Other rights groups have found evidence of widespread torture leading to death in Syrian detention facilities. In a report last year, Amnesty found that more than 17,000 people have died of torture and ill-treatment in custody across Syria since 2011, an average rate of more than 300 a month.

Those figures are comparable to battlefield deaths in Aleppo, one of the fiercest war zones in Syria, where 21,000 were killed across the province since 2011.

Saydnaya has become the main political prison in Syria since 2011, according to a former official interviewed by Amnesty. A former guard said it held “the detainees of the revolution,” and a former judge said they were seen as “posing a real risk to the regime.”

The chilling accounts in Tuesday’s report came from interviews with 31 former detainees and over 50 other officials and experts, including former guards and judges.

Detainees were told they would be transferred to civilian detention centers but were taken instead to another building in the facility and hanged.

“They walked in the ‘train,’ so they had their heads down and were trying to catch the shirt of the person in front of them. The first time I saw them, I was horrified. They were being taken to the slaughterhouse,” Hamid, a former detainee, told Amnesty.

Another former detainee, Omar Alshogre, told The Associated Press the guards would come to his cell, sometimes three times a week, and call out detainees by name.

Alshogre, 21, who spent nine months in Saydnaya and now lives in Sweden, said he would hear detainees being tortured. “Then the sound would stop,” he said.

He described how at times he was forced to keep his eyes closed and his back to the guards while they abused or suffocated a cellmate. The body often would be left behind, or there would be a pool of blood in the cell for other prisoners to clean up.

The Amnesty report contains similar accounts of abuse.

“We already know they will die anyway, so we do whatever we want with them,” Amnesty quoted a former guard as saying.

The detainees were transported to trials in vans known as “meat fridges,” and would not be informed of their fate until just before they were hanged, officials who witnessed the executions told Amnesty.

Medics would usually list the cause of death as “heart stopped,” or “breathing stopped,” before the bodies were taken to mass graves near Damascus.

Alshogre, who was arrested at the age of 17, spent time in several detention centers before being taken to Saydnaya.

Two cousins detained with him in western Syria didn’t survive, dying a year apart in a military intelligence detention facility. The younger one died in Alshogre’s arms, deprived of food and so weak he was unable to walk to the bathroom on his own.

Still, Alshogre said nothing could have prepared him for Saydnaya.

At one point, he was summoned by guards “for execution,” he said. He was brought before a military tribunal and told not to raise his eyes to the judge, who asked him how many soldiers he had killed. When he said none, the judge spared him.

Alshogre survived nine months in Saydnaya before eventually paying his way out in 2015 – a common practice. He suffered from tuberculosis and his weight fell to 77 pounds.

Death in Saydnaya was always present, “like the air,” he said.

Once when he was deprived of food for two days, a cellmate handed him his food ration – and died days later. Another cellmate died of diarrhea, also common in the prison.

“Death is the simplest thing. It was the most hoped for because it would have spared us a lot: hunger, thirst, fear, pain, cold, thinking,” he said. “Thinking was so hard. It could also kill.”</s>(CNN) Thousands of people have been hanged at a Syrian prison in a secret crackdown on dissent by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a report by Amnesty International alleges.

The human rights group says as many as 13,000 people have been executed at Saydnaya prison, north of the capital Damascus in a "hidden" campaign authorized by senior regime figures.

Amnesty's report, Human slaughterhouse, says prisoners are moved in the middle of the night from their cells under the pretext of being transferred. They are taken to the grounds of the prison, where they are hanged, likely unaware of their fate until they feel the noose around their neck, Amnesty alleges.

The report is the culmination of a year-long investigation, including interviews with 84 witnesses including security guards, detainees, judges and lawyers, Amnesty says.

Most of those hanged were civilians "believed to be opposed to the government," the report finds.

"The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population," Lynn Maalouf, the deputy director for research at Amnesty's Beirut office, said in a statement announcing the report.

Amnesty International says there are two detention centers at Saydnaya prison. In the "red building," the majority of detainees are civilians who have been arrested since the beginning of the conflict in 2011, according to the organization. In the "white building," the detainees are mainly military officers and soldiers.

CNN has asked the Syrian government for comment.

The report contends that the executed detainees were given a sham trial by "a so-called Military Field Court."

"The judge will ask the name of the detainee and whether he committed the crime. Whether the answer is yes or no, he will be convicted ... This court has no relation with the rule of law. This is not a court," a former judge said, according to Amnesty.

Nicolette Waldman, an Amnesty International researcher, elaborated on the horrific conditions prisoners allegedly face.

"They have been actually dying in massive numbers as a result of repeated torture in combination with the systematic deprivation of food, water, medicine and medical care," she told CNN.

"(The report) has gotten the attention it deserved," Waldman said. "It's a big story. But for people who work on Syria, it was almost a test case for 'Does the world still care, not just about death but the fact that it was organized, systematic?'"

In light of its findings, she said Amnesty is calling for investigation without delay and for the UN to act immediately.

"I want to be very clear that these practices are unacceptable, and they have to stop. They have to be brought to an end. Mass killings of civilians and extermination so that people are dying of starvation, of illness, of treatable diseases must stop, and Russia has a very special responsibility to uphold peace and security in the world," Waldman said.

"We are calling on them to use their influence with the Syrian authorities to push for access to independent monitors to all of the prisons in Syria run by the government where these atrocities are taking place so the perpetrators can be held to account."

Speaking at the UN, UK Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative Peter Wilson responded to the report's allegations.

"We have seen the report of Amnesty International on atrocities in Syria," he said. "Our foreign secretary has said he is sickened by that report. We strongly condemn these atrocities, and we continue to effort to shine a light on what's happening in Syria and to hold people accountable for these actions."

President Assad's regime has previously been accused of extrajudicial killings and war crimes during the country's civil war, which broke out in 2011.

One of the report's authors called it a "smoking gun" proving the use of torture.

But Assad has steadfastly maintained that many of the accusations leveled against him are politically motivated.

The UN estimates that about 400,000 people have been killed since the start of the war and another 4.8 million have fled the country.</s>Amnesty International says Syrian authorities killed at least 13,000 people in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as the “slaughterhouse.”

The group released a report Tuesday covering the period from the start of the 2011 uprising until 2015, during which Amnesty says groups of 20 to 50 people were hanged at Saydnaya Prison, once or twice a week. It says the killings were authorized by senior officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad.

Amnesty says it interviewed 31 former detainees and more than 50 officials, including prison guards and judges.

Syrian officials rarely comment on widespread allegations of torture in the country’s notorious prisons. They have denied accusations of mass killings.</s>BEIRUT — Syrian authorities have killed at least 13,000 people since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as "the slaughterhouse," Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday.

It covers the period from 2011 to 2015, when Amnesty said 20-50 people were hanged each week at Saydnaya Prison in killings authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad, and carried out by military police.

The report referred to the killings as a "calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution."

Amnesty has recorded at least 35 different methods of torture in Syria since the late 1980s, practices that only increased since 2011, said Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's regional office in Beirut.

Other rights groups have found evidence of massive torture leading to death in Syrian detention facilities. In a report last year, Amnesty found that more than 17,000 people have died of torture and ill-treatment in custody across Syria since 2011, an average rate of more than 300 deaths a month.

Those figures are comparable to battlefield deaths in Aleppo, one of the fiercest war zones in Syria, where 21,000 were killed in the province since 2011.

"The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population," Maalouf said.

While the most recent data is from 2015, Maalouf said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.

"These executions take place after a sham trial that lasts over a minute or two minutes, but they are authorized by the highest levels of authority," including the Grand Mufti, a top religious authority in Syria, and the defense minister, she said.

Syrian government officials rarely comment on allegations of torture and mass killings. In the past, they have denied reports of massacres documented by international human rights groups, describing them as propaganda.

The chilling accounts in Tuesday's report came from interviews with 31 former detainees and over 50 other officials and experts, including former guards and judges.

According to the findings, detainees were told they would be transferred to civilian detention centers but were taken instead to another building in the facility and hanged.

"They walked in the 'train,' so they had their heads down and were trying to catch the shirt of the person in front of them. The first time I saw them, I was horrified. They were being taken to the slaughterhouse," Hamid, a former detainee, told Amnesty.

Another former detainee, Omar Alshogre, told The Associated Press the guards would come to his cell, sometimes three times a week, and call out detainees by name.
A report by Amnesty International states that between 5,000 and 13,000 people, most of them civilians, were hanged at the military-run Sednaya Prison near Damascus between September 2011 and December 2015.