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Syria: Rights Activists Detained in
Crackdown
25.3.2006
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New York, March
25, 2006, -- Syrian authorities escalated a
crackdown on the country’s human rights activists by
arresting four of them over the past week, Human
Rights Watch said today. As of Friday evening
Damascus time, only one had been released.
Syrian security forces arrested Ali al-Abdullah at
his home at midday on Thursday. A few hours later,
they returned to arrest his son Muhammad, a law
student and a human rights activist in his own
right. Ali and his son remain in detention. Another
son, Omar, has been in custody since March 18.
On Wednesday night, security forces detained
Muhammad Najati Tayyara, former vice-president of
the Human Rights Association in Syria. The
authorities had summoned him for a meeting on Monday
that he declined to attend. Associates of Tayyara
indicated that he was arrested for remarks he made
at a ceremony on March 12 held to commemorate the
second anniversary of clashes in March 2004 between
Kurdish demonstrators and security forces in the
northern city of Qamishli (Kurdistan-Syria) that
left more than 30 dead and 400 injured. The
authorities released Tayyara late on Thursday
evening after he had spent 24 hours in a filthy jail
cell.
“President Bashar al-Asad should immediately free
Ali al-Abdullah and his sons and order his security
forces to halt this blatant intimidation of human
rights activists,” said Joe Stork, deputy director
for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights
Watch.
Since their arrest, the al-Abdullah family has been
unable to reach Ali or Muhammad, and the authorities
have provided no information regarding their
whereabouts or the reasons for their detention. A
fellow activist told Human Rights Watch that on the
day before their arrest, Ali and Muhammad were
monitoring the behavior of security forces outside
the Supreme State Security Court who were harassing
relatives of defendants due to appear before the
court. Muhammad al-Abdullah told an officer that
they had no right to do so.
Another son, Omar, a university student arrested on
March 18 for campaigning to form a youth group,
remains in detention.
Ali and Muhammad were also both arrested in 2005 –
Ali in May, for reading a message written by exiled
Muslim Brotherhood leader Ali Sader Eddine al-Bayanouni
during a meeting of the Jamal Atassi political
discussion forum, and Muhammad in July, for
participating in the creation of a committee for the
relatives of detainees in Syrian prisons.
Human Rights Watch called on President al-Asad to
end the harassment and persecution of human rights
defenders and to release Ali al-Abdullah and his two
sons, Muhammad and Omar, immediately and without
condition.
These latest arrests fall within a pattern of
increased harassment of human rights activists in
Syria. Two weeks ago, Syrian security forces
detained Dr. Ammar Qurabi, a spokesperson for the
Arab Human Rights Organization in Syria, for 48
hours following his return to Damascus from a trip
to Washington, D.C., and Paris.
Last November, the human rights activist Dr. Kamal
al-Labwani was arrested moments after he landed in
Syria returning from a trip abroad.
www.hrw.org
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