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| Fatima Khaled Saad |
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| The opposition group Syrian Shuhada puts the number of females killed in the uprising at 3,349 |
Ms. Fatima Khaled Saad, the 22-year-old Syrian
activist and citizen journalist snatched by President Bashar al-Assad’s
security forces from her home in Latakia last June, is feared to have died
under torture.
The Syrian League for the Defense of Human Rights believes
she passed away last Tuesday, October 23, at a Damascus branch of the General Security
Directorate.
The directorate is the regime’s most
important civil intelligence service and plays a key role in quelling internal
dissent.
Fatima,
who was a qualified nurse, was known in Syrian revolution circles by her
assumed name, “Farah el-Rayes.”
She
lived in Latakia’s poverty-stricken and densely populated suburb of Qnainis,
where she volunteered to offer first aid training to residents after the
torching by regime forces of the community’s sole public clinic.
Security forces
arrested Fatima, her father and her brother during a search of their home in
Qnainis last June 28, seizing her digital camera, memory card and mobile phone.
Her father and brother
were released a few hours later. But Fatima was held after images on her
digital camera showed her with a group of friends holding the Syrian revolution
flag and chanting against the regime.
The Syrian League for the Defense of Human Rights says Fatima was rushed
to Latakia military hospital suffering from a liver injury after her
lengthy interrogation at the Latakia
branch of the General Security Directorate.
She
was later transferred to the headquarters of the General Security Directorate in Damascus where she died
after being subjected to considerable physical and psychological violence to
reveal the names of other activists figuring on her camera.
The Syrian League for the Defense of Human Rights says
Fatima’s death takes to 1,125 the “documented” number of Syrians killed under
torture by security services since the start of the uprising in mid-March 2011.
