Colonel Hassan Haidar, commander of the military police in the eastern part of the Deir-ez-Zor province died from COVID-19, pro-regime media accounts said Monday.
Haidar, originally from the town of Yabroud in Damascus’ suburbs, took the post in 2017 after he showed extreme allegiance to the regime and the Iranian militias stationed in eastern Syria.
However, local activists doubt the death of Haidar, which comes a week after the death of a fellow military police colonel who was heading the infamous Sednaya prison.
Colonel Wassim Hassan, the former director of the Sednaya prison, died of a ‘suspicious’ heart attack, the Sednaya Prison Detainees and Missing Association said.
The Sednaya slaughterhouse had witnessed during Hassan’s era the execution of at least 500 opposition rebels despite giving them guarantees of amnesty following Russia-brokered reconciliation deals in 2017, according to testimonies by former detainees.
Several human rights reports confirmed that Assad had committed crimes against humanity in Sednaya prison with an Amnesty International report describing it as a “human slaughterhouse”.
Syrian opposition sources said that more than half a million prisoners remain inside the prisons of the Syrian regime.
This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
