U.S. Charges Ex-Syrian Prison Official With Torture

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles charged a former Syrian government official on Thursday with torturing political dissidents at a notorious prison in Damascus.

The former official, Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, 72, ran Adra prison, according to federal prosecutors, where he was personally involved in torturing inmates in a bid to stifle opposition to its recently deposed authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad.

Prosecutors said Mr. al-Sheikh ordered prisoners to be taken to a part of the prison known as the “punishment wing,” where they were beaten while hanging from the ceiling. Guards would forcibly fold bodies in half, resulting in terrible pain and fractured spines.

The indictment was the second time in a week that the Justice Department announced that it had charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses. The moves underscore its efforts to hold to account the top reaches of the government for a brutal system of detention and torture that flourished under Mr. al-Assad.

The charges against Mr. al-Sheikh on Thursday add to earlier charges in July that accused him of attempted naturalization fraud in his effort to seek U.S. citizenship, according to a criminal complaint. He was arrested attempting to fly to Beirut.

The U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Martin Estrada, cast the new charges against Mr. al-Sheikh in a grim light. “The allegations in this superseding indictment of grave human rights abuses are chilling,” he said.

Mr. al-Sheikh was charged with three counts of torture and one count of conspiracy to commit torture.

Mr. al-Sheikh immigrated to the United States in 2020 and applied for U.S. citizenship in 2023, lying on federal forms about the abuses, the authorities have said.

Prosecutors said he was appointed governor of the province of Deir al Zour by Mr. al-Assad in 2011. Mr. al-Assad’s authoritarian government crumbled over the weekend after rebels routed his forces and took control of swaths of the country.

On Monday, federal prosecutors unsealed charges against two top-ranking Syrian intelligence officials, accusing them of war crimes. The pair, Jamil Hassan and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, oversaw a prison in Damascus during the Syrian civil war, prosecutors said.

That indictment signaled the first time the United States had criminally charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses used to silence dissent and spread fear through the country.

Mr. Hassan was the head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, and Mr. Mahmoud served as a brigadier general in the Air Force’s intelligence unit. Their location is unknown.