'It was like I was reborn' Ex-inmates adapt to life after Assad

Prisoners in Sednaya prison endured squalid conditions, torture and the noise of fellow inmates being executed

- By Bethan McKernan SEDNAYA

Ofall the horrors Mohammed Ammar Hamami remembers from his time in the Assad regime's notorious Sednaya prison, the most vivid is the clanging of metal execution tables being moved on the floor below.

About once every 40 days, prison guards would drag the tables away from under the feet of condemned men.

Nooses around their necks and hands tied behind their backs, they would die by hanging. Most of the bodies were burned in Sednaya's crematorium.

"When we hear this noise, it means they are executing people," the 31-yearold said, picking up the edge of a table and letting the smash of metal on metal echo around the room. "Imagine sitting upstairs and knowing prisoners are being executed downstairs." Hamami was freed from Sednaya after five hellish years on 8 December, when Syria's longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad fled in the face of a lightningfast Islamist rebel offensive. Along with the 20 other men held in his dirty, dark cell, he heard shouting in the corridor before collapsing in astonishment when his father's face appeared in the cell door's small window.

A week later, the mechanic wanted to return to Sednaya, on the outskirts of Damascus, to retrieve clothes left behind in the chaos - but also, he said, to try to understand that what he had lived through in what he called "the killing machine" was real.