Inside Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison, dubbed the “human slaughterhouse”, Sky News saw the conditions that people were kept in until the fall of the Assad regime.
Sky News lead world presenter Yalda Hakim went inside the infamous facility and walked the halls once stalked by Bashar al Assad’s enforcers.
Human rights groups have reported on the site north of Damascus for years, warning of what has been going on.
But until rebel forces stormed the Syrian capital earlier this month, leading to the prisoners walking free, it was impossible for journalists to freely go inside.
Now, thousands of Syrians have flocked to the site this week in search of loved ones who went missing, and Hakim has reported on what she’s seen in the halls and cells of the prison.
‘Bags of faeces and urine’
“There are almost two dozen prisons scattered across this country, but this is the one that really is linked to just the brutality and torture of this regime,” Hakim said, speaking outside the facility near the capital Damascus.
“I was walking earlier from cell to cell, and I could just see the horrifying conditions that people were kept in.
“They had plastic bags full of faeces and urine because people weren’t able to go to the bathroom – if they were allowed to go to a handful of toilets here, they were only given a few seconds, so they were relieving themselves and dumping the plastic bags in the corner of the cells.”
Walking past nooses, she added that prisoners were detained, tortured and sometimes even executed inside.
One of the people who went to the prison in search of relatives holds a noose.
Pic: Reuters
Thousands of Syrians have flooded to the prison to search for relatives
“Apparently, every day, 50 people were brought out and told that they were going to be taken to some kind of civilian prison when they were brought out here to be hung,” she added.
‘Crushing machine’
Heading into one area they were told was a torture chamber, Hakim said it appeared to have been sound-proofed and had a fan installed – possibly to distribute cold air, gas, or heat into the room.
Afterwards, she reported from next to an alleged “crushing machine” which prisoners were said to have been forced into and crushed to death.
Inside the Sednaya prison
Walking around the outside of the prison, she said: “There were rumours that Assad’s guards had created a labyrinth of tunnels where they had buried some of the prisoners deep beneath the ground.
“As you walk around the outside of the prisons you see holes everywhere where people have tried to dig the ground up to see if they could find anyone.”
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‘Forgotten who they were’
Some inmates put into solitary confinement were said to have forgotten who they were.
“When the rebels came and took over this prison, they said that people couldn’t even remember who they were,” Hakim added.
The Sednaya prison.
Pic: Reuters
“They couldn’t remember their names when they went into these prisons, the prison guards told them that they were a number, not a name.
“So many people had even forgotten who they were because they’d been kept in there for so long.”
She continued: “They were tortured. They were brutalised. They were sexually assaulted and abused. They were electrocuted.”
While human rights groups have said they want to preserve the prison’s documents to maintain evidence of what went on inside, Hakim said that the families who rushed here have gone through and taken them all “because they want to find out if their loved ones were actually at this very notorious prison”.