88 protesters, including children, tortured and killed in Syrian prisons: Amnesty

Damascus | August 31, 2011 12:01:13 AM IST

Human Rights organization Amnesty International has revealed that at least 88 people, including ten children, were killed in detention centers in Syria since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's regime began in March.
The organization said that those who died, were tortured or ill-treated, with injuries ranging from beatings, burns and blunt-force traumas to whipping marks, electrocution, slashes and mutilated genitals, the Guardian reports.
Amnesty documented the names, dates and places of arrest of victims, and independent forensic pathologists established possible causes of death in some cases by examining films of the bodies, the paper said.
The group said it believes all of those who died in the custody were arrested after taking part in anti-government protests.
Amnesty's Syria researcher Neil Sammonds and Damascus-based human rights lawyer Razan Zeitouneh, said the deaths involving torture appear to have increased in recent weeks.
"These deaths behind bars are reaching massive proportions and appear to [show] the same brutal disdain for life that we are seeing daily on the streets of Syria," the paper quoted Sammonds, as saying.
"The accounts of torture we have received are horrific. We believe the Syrian government to be systematically persecuting its own people on a vast scale," Sammonds added. (ANI)