Former Syrian prison boss convicted of torturing inmates

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The former head of Syria’s largest civil prison was found guilty Monday of torturing inmates when he was in charge of the facility outside Damascus from 2005 through 2008.

A jury in Los Angeles took just a few hours to return a verdict finding Samir Ousman Alsheikh guilty on all charges

The jurors weren’t convinced by Samir Ousman Alsheikh’s argument that he was being made to take the fall for the Assad regime by U.S. prosecutors.

“History cannot be rewritten in this court of law,” Nina Marino, Alsheikh’s attorney, said in her closing argument Monday. “He’s made a scapegoat for the regime while the true criminals are running free.”

Federal prosecutors charged Alsheikh, 73, with conspiracy to commit torture and three counts of torture related to prisoners at Damascus Central Prison, also known as Adra Prison, while he was in charge of the facility from about 2005 through 2008. He’s also been charged with immigration fraud and attempted naturalization fraud for lying about his part in the abuse of prisoners when he came to the U.S. in 2020.

He faces as long as 20 years in prison on each torture charge and a maximum of 10 years for each of the immigration and naturalization charge.

“We are disappointed with the verdict,” Marino said in an emailed statement. “Mr. Alsheikh will pursue all appellate and post trial relief.”

Jurors in downtown Los Angeles heard two weeks of often horrific testimony by prisoners who said Alsheikh ordered them to the prison’s punishment wing, Wing 13, where they said they were kept in tiny isolation cells, hung from the ceilings with handcuffs and beaten and folded in half on the so-called “magic carpet” that broke their spines.

The rare trial in which a foreign official had to answer to torture charges for conduct outside the U.S. was closely watched by international human rights groups, as well as by legal observers from the Loyola Law School.

“This trial represents an important example of how allegations of serious international crimes can be examined through established legal process in U.S. courts,” Rajika Shah, director of the Loyola Justice for Atrocities Clinic, said in a statement. “Cases of this nature raise important questions about accountability, jurisdiction, and the role courts can play when allegations of severe human rights abuses are brought before them.”

Alsheikh’s defense maintained that Adra was a civil prison where — unlike in Syria’s notorious military prisons — inmates were relatively well treated and not subjected to torture.

This, they argued, was particularly true during the time when Alsheikh ran the prison, before the outbreak of civil war in Syria, and the regime of Bashar al-Assad was still trying to keep up the pretense that prisoners’ rights were respected.

Former political prisoners and a defense expert told the jury last week that around 2007 and 2008, a group of 12 prominent dissidents opposing the regime were tried in public and sent to Adra to serve their sentence. As a result, the world was watching closely what happened to these prisoners at Adra, and the Syrian government didn’t want negative publicity as it was trying to build better relations with the West.

Jabr al-Shufi, one of the 12 political prisoners that were sent to Adra, flew in from Europe to testify on behalf of Alsheikh that he never heard from other inmates at the prison that they were abused or feared being tortured.

“The prisoners kept themselves busy with cooking, playing games and watching TV,” al-Shufi said. “None of them mentioned any punishment or anything of that nature.”

And a former human rights activist in Syria — who monitored the conditions of political prisoners held at Adra in 2008 and who was retained by Alsheikh as an expert witness — testified that the prison on the outskirts of Damascus was the best civil prison in the county and that was impossible, in her opinion, that prisoners were tortured there.

Under cross-examination by the prosecution, the witness — only identified by her first name Hanadi in court records — conceded that she spoke only with 15 to 20 of the about 10,000 prisoners held at Adra. She also said prisoners there were “punished,” including by being hit on the soles of their bare feet with batons. This, she argued, was not the same as the severe torture of inmates at Syria’s military prisons.

Patrick Jasperse, an attorney with the U.S. Justice Department, said in his closing statement Monday that the former political prisoners and the expert witness, who herself spent time in Adra in 2011 and 2012, hadn’t seen the wing and that it would be very unlikely that the ordinary prisoners who had been tortured there would share their horrors with what he called the VIP political prisoners.

“Prisoners who had been to Wing 13 wouldn’t jump up and down to share what had been done to them,” Jasperse told the jurors.

Rather, they would be ashamed of their humiliation at the hands of the guards and keep a low profile while the other prisoners would shun them, he said.

The three prisoners who testified about being tortured at Alsheikh’s orders, and in one case by Alsheikh himself, were ordinary Syrians, not political prisoners. They claimed they were punished for either supporting the political prisoners, or for refusing Alsheikh’s orders to harm political prisoners that had crossed the warden.

Nedal Shikhani, one of the prisoners who testified for the prosecution, recounted how Alsheikh had sent him to be tortured at Wing 13 for writing a letter in support of one the political prisoners incarcerated at Adra.

Afterward, the other prisoners were scared to talk to him, he told the jurors.

“Because of this letter, people were scared of me,” Shikhani testified. “Nobody would accept me to sit with them — dogs were treated better than me.”

After serving as head of the Damascus, Alsheikh was called out of retirement by Assad in 2011 when Syria was caught up in the Arab Spring and mass demonstrations against the authoritarian regime erupted across the country. He was appointed governor of the Deir Ez-Zour province, an oil-rich region of the country that regime relied on for its revenue, Jasperse told the jury.

His appointment to crack down on the popular uprising in that crucial part of Syria, the government argued, indicates how much trust Assad had in him.

Syrian human rights observers have said that his conduct as governor of Deir Es-Zour was even more reprehensible than his misdeeds as prison director.

The Syrian Emergency Task Force, which alerted U.S. authorities to Alsheikh’s presence in the U.S. and helped gather testimony, said the verdict marked a major step toward justice and accountability for crimes committed by the Assad regime. It’s the first time a regime official has been tried in the U.S.

“Samir Othman Al-Sheikh, a close friend of Bashar and Maher al-Assad, is a torturer who oversaw horrific abuses at Adra Prison has finally been held accountable,” Mouaz Moustafa, the task force’s executive director said in a statement. “Al-Sheikh was behind the initial arrest of my dear friend and icon of the revolution, Mazen al-Hamada, and was responsible for atrocities including the Al-Joura and Al-Qusoor massacres while serving as Assad’s governor and head of the security committee in Deir Ezzor.”

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