Up to 13,000 hanged in Syria’s ‘slaughterhouse’ — Amnesty

Syrian military police hanged as many of 13,000 people over the course of four years in a prison known as “the slaughterhouse” before carting out their bodies by the truckload for burial in mass graves, according to a new report issued by Amnesty International.

The report says that 20-50 people were hanged each week, sometimes twice a week, at the Saydnaya prison in what the organization called a “calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution.”

The report covers the period from the start of the March 2011 uprising to December 2015, when Amnesty says between 5,000 and 13,000 people were hanged.

Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s regional office in Beirut, says there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.

Amnesty says the killings were authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad.

— AP