(BEIRUT) — Rights activists have found torture devices and other evidence of abuse in government prisons in the first Syrian city to come under the control of the opposition, Human Rights Watch said in a report Friday. Raqqa, in eastern Syria, was overrun in late February by rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad. The rebels facilitated the New York-based group's access to facilities that had belonged to a government security agency and military intelligence in late April. (PHOTOS: The Syrian Civil War: Photographs by Alessio Romenzi) The HRW said its researchers found physical evidence that Syrians were tortured, including with a device which former detainees said was used to stretch or bend victims' arms and legs. The group also found documents indicating Raqqa residents were detained for legal actions like demonstrating or helping the injured. Rights groups and opposition activists have long claimed that civilians have been detained arbitrarily, tortured, and sometimes have disappeared since the uprising against Assad's regime began. HRW's findings appear to be one of the largest finds of physical evidence bolstering those claims to date. "The documents, prison cells, interrogation rooms, and torture devices we saw in the government's security facilities are consistent with the torture former detainees have described to us," said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East director for HRW. HRW has been documenting abuses on both sides of Syria's civil war during the 26 months of conflict. The group says abuses by the Assad regime remain far more deadly, systematic and widespread, including attacks on civilians with indiscriminate battlefield weapons such as widely banned cluster bombs. But the rights group also says rebel abuses have increased in frequency and scale in recent months. In Raqqa, the group's researchers inspected the State Security and Military Intelligence branches and three other detention centers formerly managed by Criminal Security, Political Security, and Air Force Intelligence. Government forces abandoned all these institutions, which are now controlled by the rebels, the group said. On the ground floor and in the basement of the State Security facility, HRW found(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=86801&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin
Torturing a supposed criminal unjustly is never the right thing to do. It reduces the expected quality of such prisons
Most of the prisons all over the world accomodate so many atrocities that cannot be heard of. Those things have to change.