Damascus: Syrian authorities said on Friday they have arrested a former intelligence officer who appeared in a video leaked four years ago that allegedly showed him and his comrades shooting dead dozens of people during the country’s conflict.
Amjad Yousef was arrested in the central province of Hama, where he had been hiding, the Interior Ministry said, and posted a photo of him in a striped prison uniform.
Since rebels overthrew former president Bashar Assad in December 2024, dozens of members of his security agencies blamed for atrocities during the conflict have been arrested. Assad fled to Russia.
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The conflict, which began with anti-government protests in March 2011 before turning into a civil war, has left half a million people dead and over 1 million injured.
Yousef was one of several Syrian security agents who authorities said appeared in a video leaked in 2022 in which dozens of blindfolded men were shot and thrown into a trench.
The 6 minute 43 second video shows members of Syria’s Military Intelligence Branch 227 with a line of about 40 prisoners in an abandoned building in Tadamon, a suburb of Damascus near the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. For most of the war, the district was a front line between government forces and opposition fighters.
The prisoners were blindfolded, with their arms tied behind their backs. One by one, Branch 227 gunmen stand at the edge of a ditch filled with old tires, then push or kick the men inside, shooting them as they fall.
In the video, the intelligence agents tell some of the prisoners that they will pass through the sniper’s alley and that they should run. Men fall on the bodies of those who went before them. As the troops pile into the trenches, some are still moving and the gunmen fire into the pile.
The gunmen later set the bodies on fire, apparently to erase evidence of the massacre.
Last year, security forces in Syria said they arrested three people involved in the same killings.
The Interior Ministry said in its statement on Friday that authorities will pursue all those involved in the Tadamon shooting to bring them to justice.
In March 2023, the US State Department barred Yousef, his wife and close family members from entering the US.
