Qais Nour al Din Na’im, a 22-year-old college student from al-Suwayda city studying at the second branch of Damascus University’s Mechanical Engineering faculty, was arrested by Syrian regime forces on September 20, 2020, while he was passing through the Qasr al Mutamarat checkpoint in Damascus city and taken to the city’s Political Security branch.
The arrest was conducted without any legal arrest warrant being issued by a court, with no member of Qais’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.
SNHR can confirm that at least 130,689 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.
