Amman:
A Jordanian man has returned to his home country after spending 38 years in Syrian prisons, an official said Tuesday, after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad ended the agonizing wait for his family.
The man, named Osama Bashir Hassan al-Bataynah, was found in Syria “unconscious and suffering from amnesia”, Jordanian Foreign Ministry Soufian al-Kodat told AFP.
Kodat said the man’s relatives reported his disappearance in 1986, when he was just 18, and he had been in prison ever since.
“He was transferred from Damascus to the Jaber border crossing (with Jordan) where he was handed over to border guards,” Kodat added, saying the man was reunited with his family on Tuesday morning.
The rebels who ousted Assad from power on Sunday also opened prisons and released thousands of prisoners.
Civil society groups have long accused Assad of presiding over a brutal regime of arbitrary arrests, torture and murder in prisons.
Many foreigners were detained, including Suheil Hamawi of Lebanon, who returned to his country on Monday after 33 years of incarceration.
The Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan said on Tuesday that 236 Jordanians were still trapped in Syria.
Amnesty International has documented thousands of killings at Saydnaya Prison, whose name has become synonymous with the worst atrocities of Assad’s rule, calling it a “human slaughterhouse.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated in 2022 that more than 100,000 people had died in prisons since the start of a 2011 uprising that led to the civil war.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)