Man Returns Home After 38 Years In Prison

A Jordanian man has returned to his home country after spending 38 years in Syrian jails, an official said on Tuesday, after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad ended an agonising wait for his family.

The man, named Osama Bashir Hassan al-Bataynah, was found in Syria “unconscious and suffering from memory loss”, Jordanian Foreign Ministry Soufian al-Kodat told AFP.

Kodat said the man’s relatives reported his disappearance in 1986 when he was just 18, and that he had been in jail ever since.

“He was transferred from Damascus to the Jaber border crossing (with Jordan) where he was handed over to border guards,” added Kodat, saying the man had been reunited with his family on Tuesday morning.

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The rebels who swept Assad from power on Sunday also opened the prisons and released thousands of detainees.

Civil society groups had long accused Assad of presiding over a brutal regime of arbitrary arrests, torture and murder in prisons.

Many foreigners were being held, including Suheil Hamawi from Lebanon who returned to his country on Monday after being locked up for 33 years.

The Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan said Tuesday there were still 236 Jordanians detained in Syria.

Amnesty International has documented thousands of killings at Saydnaya prison, whose name has become synonymous with the worst atrocities of Assad’s rule, and dubbed it a “human slaughterhouse”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated in 2022 that more than 100,000 people had died in the jails since the start of an uprising in 2011 that led to the civil war.

AFP