“One day, our jailers decided to ask our professions. One of us said he was a doctor. They tortured him more than anyone else. » Abdul Rahman (we have chosen not to publish the last names of the witnesses for the safety of their families) pauses. He tries to resume: “His photo is among the images revealed by “Caesar” », named after a forensic photographer who exfiltrated from Syria some 45,000 photos of corpses corresponding to 6,700 dead. The day before, around twenty photographs of horribly tortured bodies had been shown to the hearing.
Abdul Rahman cannot resume his story. He asks for water, a handkerchief, tries to wipe away the tears that flow silently onto his beard. The president of the court offers him a chair, then a suspension of the hearing. Ten minutes later, the thirty-year-old with a tall waist and long hair pulled back into a bun, resumes the story of his ordeal.
Thursday May 23, on the third day of the trial of three senior officials of the Syrian intelligence services accused of complicity in crimes against humanity and complicity in war crimes, emotion entered the Paris Assize Court .
Ali Mamlouk, former head of the National Security Bureau, Jamil Hassan, former director of the feared air force intelligence service, considered the most ferocious in the Syrian security apparatus, and Abdel Salam Mahmoud , former director of the investigations department of this service are tried in their absence for the forced disappearance and death under torture of Mazzen and Patrick Dabbagh, a father and his son of Franco-Syrian nationality arrested in November 2013 in Damascus, taken at the Mazzeh military airport, headquarters of air force intelligence, and declared dead in 2018.
Abdul Rahman was arrested in April 2011, a month after the start of the Syrian democratic uprising. The service men were looking for his brother, a known activist. Like the others, he was beaten upon his arrival at the military airport, stripped naked, wrists tied, blindfolded. He spent forty days there. Every shower, every trip to the bathroom was accompanied by blows. Arrested again in 2012 while he was involved in a human rights NGO, he was again taken to Mazzeh in a 1.5 square meter cell for seven people: “We took turns sleeping due to lack of space. »
Every day, three prisoners tortured, just for routine
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