Mukhles Khaled Janidou, a man born in 1973 from Aqrab village in southern rural Hama governorate, was arrested on November 11, 2018, by Syrian regime forces in Hama city, despite being among those who had agreed to settle their security situation with the regime. He has been classified as forcibly disappeared ever since, with the Syrian regime denying any knowledge of his whereabouts and refusing to allow anyone, even a lawyer, to visit him. On December 10, 2023, his family learned he had been listed as dead in the civil registry’s records. We can confirm he was in good health at the time of his arrest, indicating a strong possibility that he died due to torture and medical negligence in a regime detention center.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) can also confirm that Syrian regime authorities have not returned Mukhles’s body to his family; this is standard practice for the regime, which has failed to return the bodies of the overwhelming majority of those who die in its detention centers to their families. Instead, the regime disposes of these bodies in mass cremations. 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 also noteworthy that approximately 135,638 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 approximately 15,051 Syrian citizens due to torture in regime detention centers since March 2011.
