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Syrian authorities said Friday they have arrested a former intelligence officer who appeared in a video leaked four years ago that purportedly showed him and his comrades fatally shooting dozens of people during that country’s civil war.
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 insurgents ousted Bashar Assad in December 2024, dozens of members of the former president’s security agencies that were blamed for atrocities during the conflict have been arrested. Assad fled to Russia.
The conflict, that began with anti-government protests in March 2011 before turning into a civil war, has left half a million people dead and over one million wounded.
Yousef was one of several Syrian security agents who authorities said appeared in a video leaked in 2022, in which dozens of blindfolded, bound men were shot and thrown into a trench.
Warning: This video contains disturbing images | The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has obtained tens of thousands of images documenting the torture of detainees under Syria’s then-president Bashar al-Assad.
U.S. special envoy to Syria Tom Barrack posted on X that the arrest was “a powerful step away from impunity toward accountability, exemplifying the new paradigm of justice emerging in post-Assad Syria: one rooted in the rule of law, national reconciliation, and the equal application of justice regardless of past affiliations.”
The six-minute, 43-second clip shows members of Syria’s notorious Military Intelligence Branch 227 with a line of around 40 prisoners in an abandoned building in Tadamon, a suburb of Damascus near the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk. For much 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 after another, the Branch 227 gunmen stand them at the edge of a trench filled with old tires, then push or kick the men in, shooting them as they fall.
In the video, the intelligence agents tell some of the prisoners that they are going to pass through a sniper’s alley and that they should run. The men tumble onto the bodies of those who went before them. As bodies pile up in the trench, some still move, and the gunmen shoot into the pile.
The gunmen later set the bodies on fire, presumably to erase evidence of the massacre.
Victims families’ celebrate arrest
Ahmed Adra, a Tadamon resident and a member of the neighbourhood committee, said victims’ families had been celebrating in the streets since morning.
“We will take white roses and plant them at the site of the massacre and tell the victims that their memory is alive and that justice is being served,” he told Reuters.
Shahoud said she now felt safe with Yousef in custody, but added the path to justice in Syria was unclear and did not include all perpetrators.
“I feel safe now, despite the distance, because I always felt for years that this person was after me,” she told Reuters.
Last year, security forces in Syria said that they arrested three people involved in the same killings.
The Interior Ministry said in its statement Friday that authorities will go after all those involved in the Tadamon shooting to bring them to justice.
In March 2023, the U.S. State Department banned entry into the U.S. of Yousef, his wife and immediate members of his family.