Assad regime forces Palestinian torture victims’ families to sign death certificates giving ‘heart attack’ as cause of death: report

Dec 20, 2020

The Action Group for Palestinians of Syria (AGPS) has quoted a number of families of Palestinian victims of torture killed in Assad regime prisons as stating that regime security personnel forced them to sign forged reports and death certificates issued by the infamous Tishreen Military Hospital claiming that their family members had died as a result of a ‘heart attack’.

The group reported that this procedure takes place after families are informed that their children, spouses or parents have died in prison or after finding out about their fate through intermediaries or the regime’s ‘military courts’. The same procedure has also been reported often by Syrian families.

AGPS cited an interview with the wife of one of the Palestinian victims tortured to death in a Syrian regime prison, who said that after enduring terrible suffering and torment over her husband’s fate and trying desperately to find out what had happened to him after he was imprisoned by the regime (by which she could endanger herself, with the regime routinely imprisoning those who demand information about ‘missing’ loved ones), she had been given a forged certificate giving his cause of death as a heart attack only after agreeing not to challenge this patently false claim and to remain silent and not ask about him again or discuss his case. She was reportedly told by regime officials that she was “lucky” to receive that certificate.

After being given the death certificate, the traumatized woman, who is also Palestinian, said that she had “been informed by a detainee released from a regime prison that he had seen her husband alive after the date given for his death on the regime document. This is, apparently, not unusual, with activists confirming that a number of the families of the victims who received these certificates learned from detainees who were subsequently released that they had seen their family members in security branches or in the infamous Sednaya Military Prison, after the supposed date of their deaths on these regime ‘death certificates’.

The AGPS has called on the Syrian regime to disclose the status of hundreds of Palestinian detainees whose fate is unknown, stressing that what is happening inside the Syrian prisons for Palestinians is a "war crime by all standards."

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- S.N.N.

Photos from Zaman al Wasl