A US federal court in Los Angeles sentenced a former Syrian government official who ran one of the country’s most infamous prisons to 60 years in prison on Thursday – the most significant punishment handed to an official of ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s regime by a foreign court and to a defendant present in person. Samir Ousman al-Sheikh was the head of the Adra prison, on the outskirts of Damascus, between 2005 and 2008, when he oversaw an underground “punishment wing”, known as “Wing 13”, in which prisoners and regime opponents were interrogated and tortured as he watched through surveillance cameras. A federal jury convicted al-Sheikh last March of having tortured prisoners and then lying about it in US immigration forms.
Al-Sheikh’s legal team and the justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Following al-Sheikh’s conviction, Bill Essayli, first assistant US attorney, had said in a statement that the case showed the US “is not a refuge for criminals – especially criminals who engage in the brutality of the kind this defendant inflicted on his victims”. Al-Sheikh, 73, who also served as governor of Syria’s Deir Ez-Zour province in 2011, at a time of violent regime crackdowns against protesters, moved to the United States in 2020, obtained a green card and applied for US citizenship.
He was arrested in July 2024 at Los Angeles international airport on immigration fraud charges and prosecutors later added four-torture related charges. He is the first al-Assad regime official to go to trial in the US and the highest ranking regime official to be tried anywhere in the world in person. Al-Assad was ousted by a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024 which toppled the regime in just 11 days.
Since then, Syria’s new government has held a number of in absentia trials for former regime officials in connection to crimes committed during the country’s years-long civil war, which killed about half a million people and displaced half the country’s prewar population of 23 million. In August, a court sentenced al-Assad and his brother Maher to death for crimes against humanity and war crimes, but the two men have been in Moscow since the regime’s collapse. Other factions in Syria’s civil war have also been accused of abuse of detainees, including insurgent groups and the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
During al-Sheikh’s nine-day trial, several victims and witnesses testified. They described guards folding prisoners into car tires, restraining and beating them. Some they said, were cuffed by their wrists to pipes on the ceiling, beaten with cables, and left suspended for extended periods of time.
Others testified that they were placed on a device known as a “magic carpet,” which consisted of two large wooden panels with hinges in the middle onto which guards strapped prisoners, forcing the panels together to cause excruciating pain. One victim recalled al-Sheikh himself stomping on the device. Another testified he was subjected to the “magic carpet” as punishment for writing a letter of support to a political prisoner and also forced to wear a red jumpsuit assigned to prisoners designated for execution, leading him to believe he was going to die.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
