The official, Akram Salloum al-Abdullah, is accused of executing detainees, and different ‘critical violations’.
Revealed On 22 Oct 2025
Syrian authorities have stated they’d arrested a former army official accused of executing detainees at the notorious Sednaya prison throughout the rule of former President Bashar al-Assad.
In an announcement on Wednesday, the inside ministry stated the Damascus province’s counterterrorism department arrested Main Basic Akram Salloum al-Abdullah.
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It stated he had held “a number of positions, most notably as Commander of the Army Police on the defence ministry between 2014 and 2015, throughout the rule of the previous regime”.
The ministry acknowledged that Abdullah was “implicated in committing critical violations towards detainees in Sednaya jail”, accusing him of being “straight accountable for finishing up the executions of detainees inside Sednaya army jail … throughout his tenure as commander of the army police”.
‘Human slaughterhouse’
The jail, outdoors Damascus, was one of many darkest parts of the al-Assad household rule, which ended after greater than 50 years when Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by an offensive in December.
Rights group Amnesty Worldwide has referred to as the power a “human slaughterhouse”.
A 2017 report by Amnesty stated “homicide, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination” had been widespread on the jail since 2011 when the nation’s warfare broke out. The rights organisation discovered that these practices quantity to crimes towards humanity.
A 2014 report by Human Rights Watch corroborated accounts from former detainees of the jail about mass deaths on the facility.
The Affiliation of Detainees and Lacking Individuals of Sednaya Jail estimates that 30,000 individuals have been taken into detention within the facility from 2011 onwards, whereas solely about 6,000 have been launched.
The others stay lacking.
Diab Serriya, cofounder of the affiliation, stated that Abdullah was “the highest-ranked particular person” to be arrested over Sednaya up to now.
Serriya stated the army police was accountable for the jail, and that the interval underneath Abdullah’s management noticed many executions and acts of torture towards prisoners.
“He’s accountable for these crimes,” he instructed the AFP information company.
In a submit on Fb, Serriya additionally stated that Sednaya’s so-called “salt rooms”, which “served as warehouses for storing our bodies pending their switch to mass graves”, have been created throughout Abdullah’s tenure.
Based on Syria’s Civil Defence, the White Helmets, 50 to 100 people were executed daily contained in the jail, which largely housed political prisoners who opposed al-Assad’s rule.
Greater than 200,000 individuals have died in Syria’s prisons, together with by execution and underneath torture, in keeping with the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.
