Two Syrian officials indicted in the US for torture at infamous prison

WASHINGTON – Two senior Syrian officials are being accused by U.S. prosecutors of supervising a notorious prison where peaceful protesters and other political prisoners were tortured, including a 26-year-old American woman who was later believed to have been executed.

The indictment was revealed on Monday, following a surprise rebel offensive that ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad. The U.S., U.N., and others have accused him of extensive human rights violations during his 13-year campaign to suppress opposition forces aiming to remove him from power.

The war, which began as a largely nonviolent popular uprising in 2011, has killed half a million people.

This indictment, submitted on Nov. 18 in a federal court in Chicago, is thought to be the first from the U.S. government targeting networks of Assad’s intelligence services, military divisions, and other affiliated groups that detained, tortured, and killed numerous perceived adversaries.

It names Jamil Hassan, director of the Syrian air force’s intelligence branch, who prosecutors say oversaw a prison and torture center at the Mezzeh air force base in the capital, Damascus, and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, who prosecutors say ran the prison.

The indictment charges the two with conspiring to commit cruel and inhuman treatment of civilian detainees during the course of the Syrian civil war. Detainees at the prison were whipped, kicked, electrocuted, burned and subjected to other mental and physical abuse, including being housed in cells alongside corpses of dead detainees, prosecutors allege.

Victims included Syrians, Americans and dual citizens, the indictment said. The U.S.-based Syrian Emergency Task Force has long pushed federal prosecutors for action on the cases, including that of 26-year-old American aid worker Layla Shweikani.

The group presented witnesses who testified of Shweikani’s 2016 torture at the prison. Syrian rights groups believe she was later executed at the Saydnaya military prison in the Damascus suburbs.

“Now it is our time to capture these criminals and bring them to the United States for trial,” the Syrian Emergency Task Force said in a statement Monday. The group’s leader, Mouaz Moustafa, said his relatives were among those tortured at the prison.

Federal prosecutors said they had issued arrest warrants for the two officials, who remain at large.

Prospects of bringing them to trial were unclear. Assad’s toppling by the rebels over the weekend has scattered his government and left citizens searching prison torture centers around the country for survivors and evidence.