The report charts abuses dating back to the start of the Syrian uprising against President Bashar Assad in March 2011.
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Nearly 18,000 Syrians have died in government jails since 2011, with authorities using torture, beatings, electric shocks and rape against prisoners on a “massive scale”, a rights groups has said.
Syrian authorities are committing torture on a “massive scale” in government prisons including beatings, electric shocks, rape and psychological abuse that amount to crimes against humanity, Amnesty International said Thursday.
Some say they witnessed prisoners dying in custody.
Nicolette Boehland, one of the Amnesty researchers who worked on the report, told Al Jazeera that “welcome parties” were so intense that some prisoners died from their injuries.
The human rights organisation has released a report this morning detailing what its described as the inhumane torture of detainees in prisons.
Other prisoners spoke of being flogged on their feet during interrogations, being forced into rubber tyres while being beaten with plastic pipes, being suspended by their wrists and having their bodies forcefully “folded” backwards while in stress positions.
“They treated us like creatures. They wanted people to be as inhuman as possible”, according to a former detainee identified as Samer, who Amnesty said was arrested while transporting humanitarian supplies.
The group quoted an inmate as saying: “I saw the blood, it was like a river…”
He described one incident when guards beat to death an imprisoned Kung Fu trainer after they found out he had been training others in his cell: “They beat the trainer and five others to death straight away, and then continued on the other 14”. They were very happy to welcome us.
“They started to kick us to see who was living and who was not”, Ziad said.
Detainees also reported that access to food, water and sanitation facilities was often severely restricted.
“For years Russian Federation has used its United Nations security council veto to shield its ally, the Syrian government”, according to Amnesty’s Philip Luther, “and to prevent individual perpetrators within the government and military from facing justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the global criminal court”.
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“The worldwide community, in particular Russian Federation and the US, which are co-chairing peace talks on Syria, must bring these abuses to the top of the agenda in their discussions with both the authorities and armed groups and press them to end the use of torture and other ill-treatment”.
