SYRIA

Intro: Boris Johnson sickened by Amnesty report that Syrian regime ‘exterminated’ 13,000 captives.

The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has said he was “sickened” by reports that Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has tortured and hanged 13,000 political prisoners in four years.

Amid compelling evidence that the Syrian president’s henchmen carried out an unprecedented “policy of extermination”, Mr Johnson said the dictator had “no future as leader”.

Civilians perceived to be opposed to the brutal regime – including medical doctors and aid workers – were executed in mass hangings of up to 50 detainees at a time, according to a chilling Amnesty International dossier.

Victims were given death sentences after sham trials lasting less than three minutes, often on the basis of confessions extracted through torture, the human rights charity has said. Many thousands of others held at the notorious 20,000-capacity Saydnaya military prison, north of Damascus, died from starvation and disease.

Amnesty International’s year-long investigation drew on graphic accounts from witnesses, including judges, officials, and former guards at the prison.

One source, a former military officer known only as Hamid, who was arrested in 2011, described hearing the killings taking place from the floor above. He said: ‘If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling … We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death.’

The bodies of those hanged are believed to have been dumped in mass graves on military land on the outskirts of the war-ravaged capital.

The report said it was ‘inconceivable that these large-scale practices have not been authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government’.

It is the first evidence said to prove that Assad, 51, has authorised torture to punish opponents and crush dissent. He has long been suspected of such action.

Individual death sentences are supposed to be approved by either the Syrian minister of defence or the chief of staff of the army, both of whom are authorised to act on behalf of Assad.

Thousands hanged at Saydnaya prison, Amnesty International has said.

Following publication of the study, Mr Johnson took to social media networking site Twitter, and said: ‘Sickened by reports from Amnesty International on executions in Syria. Assad responsible for so many deaths and has no future as leader.’

His comments appear to back away from his suggestions last month that Assad could be allowed to run for re-election in a bid to end Syrian’s civil war, which has left nearly 400,000 dead and half the population displaced.

A statement released by 10 Downing Street said: ‘The Foreign Secretary stressed that Britain [doesn’t] believe that Assad can govern the country or take control of its democratically elected government.’

Amnesty’s report, titled Human Slaughterhouse, reveals that as well as extrajudicial executions, the Syrian authorities are deliberately inflicting horrific conditions on detainees, including torture and denial of food, water and medicine.

Since the uprising began in 2011, the prison has been filled with those accused of opposing Assad or taking part in anti-government protests, as well as military personnel said to be working against the regime or plotting to defect.

Upon arriving at Saydnaya, they undergo a brutal session of beating – referred to as the ‘welcome party’. Witnesses described a methodical routine to the killings, in which the doomed detainees were collected from their cell blocks in the afternoon and told they were being transferred to civilian prisons.

Instead, they were moved to a facility in the grounds known as the ‘red building’, where they were beaten for several hours.

Between midnight and 3am, they were then blindfolded and moved in delivery trucks and minibuses to another part of the jail called the ‘white building’. There, they were taken into a basement room, nooses were placed around their necks and they were hanged. Following the executions, the prisoners’ bodies were taken to Tishreen military hospital where they were registered as having died of natural causes. The corpses were then loaded onto trucks to be secretly buried in mass graves, the report said. Families of the dead were never informed.

Amnesty said the evidence, from between 2011 and 2015, amounted to crimes against humanity and called on the UN to investigate.

A spokesperson for Amnesty said: ‘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.

‘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. Those responsible for these heinous crimes must be brought to justice.’ The report adds to previous evidence of abuses, which could result in Assad and key figures in his regime being hauled before international criminal courts charged with crimes against humanity.

In August 2013, a defector known only as Caesar fled Syria with files containing photographs of the bodies of more than 28,000 victims who had died under torture in prison.

The state of the bodies – which were covered in horrific wounds – and their sheer number revealed the scale of the abuse.

Amnesty’s report was published ahead of talks in Geneva aiming to end the bloody civil war.

Assad’s representatives are preparing to meet officials from Turkey, who have backed the rebels, later this month. Russia and Iran, both Assad’s allies, will join the talks.