The Syrian Ministry of the Interior on Friday said it had arrested the main suspect in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, one of the worst acts of violence attributed to the government of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, in which 288 civilians were killed.
The ministry released footage of Amjad Yousef’s arrest in the Al-Ghab Plain area of Hama province in western Syria, near his hometown.
Yousef had been hiding there since the overthrow of Assad at the end of 2024, a security source said.
Photo: the Syrian Ministry of the Interior via EPA
US Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack welcomed the arrest in a post on X, calling it an important step toward accountability for atrocities committed during Syria’s war.
Yousef, 40, a former member of military intelligence under Assad, was thrust into the spotlight in April 2022 when the UK’s Guardian newspaper published videos provided by two academics that they said showed him forcing blindfolded civilians to run toward a pit in the Tadamon neighborhood of southern Damascus before shooting them.
University of Amsterdam Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies researcher Annsar Shahoud and one of the academics, spent four years documenting the massacre.
Posing as an online fangirl, Shahoud gained Yousef’s trust and obtained his confessions on video and audio recording.
The massacre is one of the most egregious documented incidents of violence attributed to the al-Assad government during the 14-year bloody war that began in 2011.
After al-Assad’s fall at the end of 2024, civilians, media outlets and international organizations went to the site of the massacre to inspect it and interview witnesses. Locals refer to the site as “Amjad Yousef’s Pit.”
It has been marked on Google Maps as “The Site of the Tadamon Massacre.”
Ahmed Adra, a Tadamon resident and a member of the neighborhood committee, said victims’ families had been celebrating in the streets since morning.
“We will take white roses and plant them at the site of the massacre, and tell the victims that their memory is alive and that justice is being served,” he said.
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