Judge who sentenced thousands to death in Syria arrested
Judge who sentenced thousands to death in Syria arrested
Muhammad Kanjo Hassan, who sentenced thousands of people to death, was arrested by the new Syrian government in Tartus province along with 20 others in his entourage.
Photo: Asaad al-Asaad/newscon/picture alliance
Syria's new government has arrested former military judge Muhammad Kanjo Hassan, who issued death sentences to prisoners at the notorious Sednaya prison under President Bashar Assad's regime, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on Thursday, December 26.
Mohammed Kanjo Hassan was arrested along with 20 others in his entourage in Tartus province, a stronghold of the Assad clan. According to SOHR, Kanjo Hassan has issued thousands of sentences, including the death penalty, to prisoners at Sednaya prison.
Diab Serria, co-founder of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), said that Mohammed Kanjo Hassan headed the Syrian military field court from 2011 to 2014, during the first three years of the Syrian civil war. He was later promoted to head of military justice for all of Syria. Serria said that Kanjo Hassan sentenced "thousands" of people to death, often "with trials lasting a few minutes."
Two mass graves found near Damascus
More than 100,000 people may have been tortured or killed in Syria since 2013 under its ruler, Bashar al-Assad, Stephen Rapp, a former US ambassador investigating war crimes, told Reuters on December 17.
He has previously visited two mass graves: in Qutayfa and Najha, near Damascus. "We definitely have more than 100,000 people who disappeared and were tortured to death in this car (from mass torture and killings)," he said.
"We haven't seen anything like this since the Nazi era," said Rapp. He previously led the prosecution at war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone and is now working with Syrian civil society to document evidence of war crimes committed by the Assad regime and prepare for potential trials, Reuters explains.
For his part, Muaz Mustafa, a human rights activist who heads the United States-based Syrian Emergency Response Group, told reporters that he estimates that at least one hundred thousand bodies have been buried in Qutayfa alone.
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