LOS ANGELES (CN) - A former inmate at the Adra Prison near Damascus testified on Tuesday that the general in charge of the prison ordered him to poison a political dissident who was housed in the hospital wing and who had smuggled a human rights pamphlet out of the facility.

Khaled Abdul Malek was the first witness to testify at the trial of former Syrian government official Samir Ousman Alsheikh in Los Angeles.

When he refused to comply with Alsheikh's order, Malek said he was sent to "Wing 13," the prison's punishment wing, where he was tortured.

Alsheikh, 72, was in charge of Damascus Central Prison, known as Adra Prison, from about 2005 through 2008. Prosecutors with the U.S. Justice Department accuse him of ordering prison guards to torture political and other prisoners as well as of participating personally in the mistreatment of prisoners.

"Every prisoner was afraid of Wing 13," Patrick Jasperse, a trial attorney with the Justice Department told the jury in his opening statement.

At the time Alsheikh was in charge of the prison, the regime of Bashar al-Assad still had relationships with the United States and other Western countries, Jasperse said, and the Syrian government didn't want to openly mistreat or kill political dissidents.

That's why Alsheikh sought to enlist other prisoners to harm or kill dissidents who were housed at Adra Prison, such as the Syrian member of parliament who Malek had been told the poison, according to the prosecutor.

Inmates who refused or otherwise showed support for the political prisoners, got sent to Wing 13, an underground complex where they were beaten while suspended from the ceiling with their arms extended and strapped to a device called the "flying carpet" or "magic carpet," which folded their bodies in half at the waist, causing excruciating pain and sometimes resulting in fractured spines.

Alsheikh is charged with conspiring with other Syrian officials to torture prisoners at Adra Prison as well as three counts of ordering the torture of three individual prisoners, including Malek, who will testify at the trial.

In addition, Alsheikh is charged with immigration fraud and attempted naturalization fraud for lying on his U.S. visa and citizenship applications about his involvement in the torture of dissidents.

Nina Marino, one of Alsheikh's attorneys, told the jury in her opening statement that prisoners weren't tortured in Adra Prison, which she said was a civil prison, as opposed to the military and intelligence prisons in Syria where the widely reported human rights abuses in Syria occurred.

"The Assad regime is not on trial here," she argued. "Mr. Alsheikh shouldn't be made to pay for Assad's crime.

Alsheikh, according to the prosecution, held a variety of positions in the Syrian police and the Syrian state security apparatus. When civil war erupted in Syria, Assad appointed him governor of Deir Ez-Zour, an oil-rich province in the east of Syria where opposition to regime was rife. He immigrated to the United States in 2020 and applied for U.S. citizenship in 2023.

Malek, a former Syrian policeman who ended up in Adra Prison on smuggling charges, now lives in Germany with his family.

He said that Alsheikh, shortly after he became the new boss of the prison, had put him in charge of the hospital wing where a particularly sensitive political prisoner was housed. Through an Arabic interpreter, Malek testified that Alsheikh instructed him to monitor this prisoner closely and to befriend him.

"Even if he breathes, I need to know what he's breathing - those were his exact words," Malek recounted Alsheikh's instructions to the jurors.

After the dissident in the hospital wing had managed to smuggle a document out of the prison, Alsheikh was furious, Malek testified, using foul language and saying that the prisoner was a spy for the West and the United States. Another prisoner who worked on the computers at the facility was dragged through the corridors into Alsheikh's office, purportedly for having helped the dissident.

After that, Malek said he met with Alsheikh in his office, and the general wanted to give him a bottle with poison to put into the political prisoner's food.

"He said he'll die slowly," Malek told the jury. "He said he was a spy and we needed to get rid of him."

"I refused completely," Malek added.

Source: Courthouse News Service