Reporter and the office manager of the ‘Buq’aat Daw’ (Spotlight) magazine in Aleppo city, named as Waddah Muhi al Din, born in 1955, from Aleppo city, was arrested by Syrian regime forces in the city on January 9, 2021, after he criticized robberies taking place in the city’s markets on his Facebook account, and taken to the criminal security branch in Damascus city. The arrest was conducted without any legal arrest warrant being issued by a court, with no member of Waddah’s family being informed of his arrest or whereabouts, and with his phone being confiscated, preventing him from contacting his family or a lawyer. SNHR fears that he will be subjected to torture and ultimately classified as forcibly ‘disappeared’, like approximately 85 percent of all detained persons in Syria. SNHR can confirm that at least 130,758 Syrian citizens are still detained or forcibly disappeared in the regime’s detention centers, constituting a grave threat to the detainees’ wellbeing, given the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
