Syrian security officials tortured a pregnant mother and a father with electric shocks in front of their infant sons, according to an eyewitness who was held in the same cell.
A Syrian Army tank patrolling in Duma in the suburbs of the capital Damascus Photo: AFP/GETTY
By David Blair, Yayladagi, Turkey
10:00PM BST 06 Apr 2012
Ayman Karnebo spent a week in prison in Idlib province when the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began spreading across the country last May.
His account sheds more light on the depravity of a prison system in which an entire family can be locked up and subjected to brutal torment.
Mr Karnebo spent a day in the same cell as the captive family, who were of Somali origin. As the revolt took hold, all outsiders were viewed with deep suspicion, apparently explaining their arrest.
The father, whose name was Ahmed and who looked to be in his twenties, was in the cell alongside his pregnant wife, who was about the same age. The couple's two boys - aged about three and five - were also with them. So was Ahmed's mother, a woman in her fifties.
"The security men wanted them to confess to destroying buildings. They wanted them to admit they had come from outside the country to cause trouble in Syria," said Mr Karnebo. "But they were just people who had come to Syria to look for a better life."
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All three adults, including the grandmother and the pregnant mother, were tortured with electric shocks in front of the terrified children. Shocks were systematically applied to the most vulnerable parts of the body, concentrating on elbows, hands and toes.
"I know the Somali man's name because they were shouting at him 'Ahmed confess, Ahmed you must confess'," remembered Mr Karnebo.
"When they went to torture the wife, the husband was shouting 'she is pregnant, she has a baby inside her'. But they had no problem with doing this to her. They had no mercy."
After suffering this torment for a day, the family was bundled out of the cell, located in the prison in the town of Jisr al-Shugur, and transferred to another jail. Mr Karnebo believes they went to Idlib central prison, but their fate is unknown.
He bears the scars inflicted by the same treatment: gashes in his elbows and hands show where electric shocks were applied. "They accused me of destroying the office of [Mr Assad's] Ba'ath party," said Mr Karnebo, 37. "They found I had a Turkish SIM card for my mobile, so they accused me of communicating with the opposition in Turkey. They said I was raising money for guns for the rebels."
When he refused to confess, he was pushed into the same cell as the Somalis, where his torture took place. Mr Karnebo still refused to sign an admission of guilt, so an official known as Abdul Majid simply forged a signature on a written confession.
But one of Mr Karnebo's relatives is a local Ba'ath party official. This man paid a bribe to secure his release. Thanks to the influence of this relative, Mr Karnebo considers his own treatment to have been relatively lenient. "He paid bribes to make sure I wasn't tortured so badly," said Mr Karnebo, who later fled to neighbouring Turkey and now lives in a refugee camp in the border town of Yayladagi.
Many of the fugitives, who inhabit blue and white tents pitched in the grounds of a hospital, have suffered at the hands of Mr Assad's security forces. But one man, known as Mukhtar, was part of the machine that inflicted the torment.
He worked as a guard in the "investigations" wing of Idlib central prison, where security officials would routinely torture inmates. Mukhtar, 32, did not take part himself, but he witnessed the various methods used to extract information and confessions.
Some prisoners were forced into the "cross" position: spread-eagled against a wall and compelled to stand on tiptoe, with wrists and ankles bound. They were then subjected to electric shocks, with special attention being paid to the toes.
Others were tied to a table, exposing the soles of the feet to being whipped with an electric flex. Some male prisoners were subjected to sexual assaults, with one named official being particularly notorious for violating his charges.
After witnessing this treatment for seven months, Mukhtar fled to Turkey last November. "For me, all the prisoners were my people. I never wanted to see them harmed," he said.
The treatment meted out to political prisoners has often been effective in breaking their will to resist. Yusuf Dandash spent 23 days in jail last year, blindfolded, handcuffed and enduring constant beatings. The soles of his feet were excoriated with an electric flex, before shocks were applied to his toes.
"After they did this to me, I gave them everything," he said. "I accepted what they wanted."
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