BEIRUT — At least 60,000 people have died from torture and other maltreatment in Syrian jails since a revolt against President Bashar Assad broke out five years ago, a monitoring group said Saturday, quoting sources in the country’s security forces.
The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the figure of 60,000 deaths came from reliable sources, primarily in the air force intelligence and state security agencies and at the Sednaya prison near Damascus.
The victims died as a direct result of torture or from a lack of food and medicine in the jails, the Britain-based monitoring group said.
The observatory said that using other sources, it had documented the deaths of 14,456 detainees, including 110 children under 18.
The Syrian opposition has pushed for the release of detainees.
United Nations investigators in February charged that the Syrian government was carrying out an extermination policy against its prisoners.
The investigators cited testimony from witnesses who recounted inmates dying from “torture, disease, and appalling prison conditions,” and then being buried in mass graves.
This month, inmates in Hama prison in central Syria rioted and took guards hostage in protest of an attempt to transfer several prisoners to Sednaya prison.
The inmates feared that the transferees, who had been sentenced to death by ad-hoc military courts, would face execution, the observatory reported at the time.
Authorities regained control after agreeing to the release of dozens of detainees, according to the monitoring group.
The observatory called on the U.N. to pressure the Syrian government for the release of what it said were more than 200,000 remaining detainees.
