Former Syrian prison boss gets 60 years for torturing inmates

The judge called Samir Alsheikh's treatment of prisoners unimaginably cruel in rejecting his bid for just five years in prison.LOS ANGELES (CN) — The former head of Syria’s largest civil prison was sentenced to 60 years on Thursday for torturing inmates when he was in charge of the facility outside Damascus from 2005 through 2008.Samir Ousman Alsheikh, 74, was convicted in March of conspiracy to commit torture and three counts of torture related to prisoners at Damascus Central Prison, also known as Adra Prison, as well as of 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.U.S. District Judge Hernán Vera, citing the “utter reprehensibility” of Alsheikh’s crime, rejected his request for just five years’ prison, after which he would agree to be deported to Syria.The Joe Biden appointee went short of the 80-year sentence the Justice Department had asked for because of Alsheikh’s age and medical problems, as well as the many letters from family, friends and community members, which Vera said he found genuine and which praised Alsheikh’s overall character.“The conduct was heinous, unimaginably cruel and unspeakably violent and brutal,” the judge said, referring to the torture Alsheikh subjected the prisoners under his charge to.Jurors in downtown Los Angeles heard two weeks of often horrific testimony by former inmates 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.Alsheikh, through an interpreter, told the judge he had been at odds with the regime of Bashar al-Assad about the treatment of the regime’s political opponents and believed he was going to be killed because of his reluctance to crack down on the opposition.“I was under a lot of pressure and harassment of that regime,” Alsheikh said. “I ignored it because I wanted to protect my family.”Nina Marino, his attorney, argued the judge wasn’t charged to punish the brutal regime that was ousted two years ago after a protracted civil war that left hundreds of thousands of people dead.Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Mausner, however, said Alsheikh had engaged in a lifetime of terror to support the Assad regime.“There’s not an ounce of remorse,” the prosecutor argued. “The defendant continues to have no regard for the suffering he caused.”The rare trial in which a foreign official had to answer 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.“Today’s sentence marks an important milestone in the pursuit of justice for the Syrian people and for all victims of the Assad regime,” the Syrian Emergency Task Force said in a statement. “For the first time, a senior Assad regime official has been held criminally accountable for torture in a U.S. federal court, and Al-Sheikh is the highest-ranking Assad regime official ever arrested and tried outside Syria.”Alsheikh’s defense maintained 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.Three former prisoners testified at the trial about being tortured at Alsheikh’s orders and, in one case, by Alsheikh himself. They were ordinary Syrians, not the prominent political prisoners held at the facility who were treated more leniently at the time to prop up Assad’s image in the West.The witnesses told the jury how they were punished for either supporting the political prisoners or for refusing Alsheikh’s orders to harm political prisoners who 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 of 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 Deir Ez-Zor province, an oil-rich region the regime relied on for revenue.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 his conduct as governor of Deir Ez-Zor was even more reprehensible than his misdeeds as prison director.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads