A man, identified as 37-year-old Rami Mohammad al-Hariri from Seyda town in the eastern suburbs of Daraa governorate, has died due to torture inside regime detention centers. Rami was arrested back in 2021 at a regime checkpoint in Damascus city as he was heading for the Syrian-Lebanese borders to unofficially cross into Lebanon, even though he had previously agreed to a security settlement with the Syrian regime. He has been forcibly disappeared ever since his arrest, with the regime denying detaining him or allowing anyone to visit him, even a lawyer. On June 14, 2023, his family learned that he was registered as dead in the civil registry. We can confirm that he was in good health at the time of his arrest, indicating a strong possibility that he had died due to torture and medical negligence.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) can also confirm that Syrian regime forces have not returned Rami’s dead body to his family; this is a common practice for the regime, which fails to return the overwhelming majority of the bodies of those who die in its detention centers to their families. Instead, the Syrian regime dispose of these dead bodies in deliberate mass incinerations. It should be noted that, as long as the victim’s body is not returned to his or her family, the individual in question is still classified as a forcibly disappeared person.
It is noteworthy that approximately 135,481 Syrian citizens are still detained or forcibly disappeared in Syrian regime detention centers. We have serious concerns about their fate. We have documented the deaths of at least 15,039 Syrian citizens due to torture in regime detention centers since March 2011.
