Panorama of Week: Small number released after "amnesty"

 During the past week, the Arab newspapers discussed the fate of detainees who are still languishing in the prisons of the Damascus government.

 Hundreds gather in Damascus, awaiting the arrival of prisoners included in the "presidential amnesty"

 On the Syrian issue, Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper said: “Hundreds of families of detainees in Syrian prisons are following with great interest the process of implementing the decree of amnesty for (terrorist crimes) issued by the presidency, amid fears that some prisoners have been subjected to liquidation, as the decree excluded the crimes that (  led to the death of a human being), a phrase that opponents fear may refer to the (execution) of prisoners who have been charged with this charge.

 Since the implementation of the "amnesty decree", last Sunday, the "President's Bridge" area in the center of the capital Damascus, the square of the city of Sednaya and the suburb of Adra in the northern Damascus countryside, have witnessed large gatherings of detainees' families in the hope that they are still alive after their absence in prisons and detention centers for years.   The released are transported on buses to those areas and left there without money to enable them to return to their original areas of residence.

 Civil sources reported that drivers of public cars (taxis), especially small service cars, transported some of the released detainees to their neighborhoods for free.  It wondered, "Where will the released, whose relatives remain in the regime-controlled areas, go?"

 Facebook pages also published pictures of crowds of detainees' families gathered under the "President's Bridge" waiting for their released relatives.  The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that a large part of those who were released had lost their memory.

 At the same time, activists on social media continue to publish lists of detainees who have been released from prisons, including the notorious Sednaya prison, while the "Syrian Observatory" documented the security services' release, until last Monday, of 240 detainees from various Syrian governorates.  Noting that the releases will continue until next June.

 Human rights activists described the number of those released so far as "very few", and one of them said, "Since the outbreak of (the revolution) more than 11 years ago, tens of thousands have been arrested while they are imprisoned, and therefore those who have been released are almost a non-existent mentioned number.

 In this context, the "Syrian Observatory" stated that the security services told the "members of the partisan teams" of the ruling Baath Party within its areas of control that a large number of detainees will be released in the coming hours.  He pointed out that under the amnesty decree, "we are supposed to witness the release of tens of thousands of detainees imprisoned in the regime's prisons."

 The father of one of the detainees said that his son has not yet been released.  He explained, "They arrested him in 2012 because he participated in demonstrations, and all we know is that he is in Sednaya prison, and the last information we received was in 2015 that he was still alive at the time."  Nobody knew anything about him...the fear that they killed him."

 "This is the first time in years that prisoners have been released from Sednaya prison," Muhammad al-Abdullah, director of the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability, told AFP.  According to Amnesty International, Sednaya prison was a "human butcher", with authorities executing an estimated 13,000 people by hanging in four years.

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