Los Angeles court gives Assad-era prison chief 60 years for torture

A federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced Samir Ousman Alsheikh to 60 years in prison on Thursday for torturing inmates at Syria's Adra Prison and lying to US immigration officers to enter the country.

Alsheikh, 74, ran Damascus Central Prison, known as Adra, from about 2005 to 2008 as a brigadier general under Bashar al-Assad. A jury in March convicted him of one count of conspiracy to commit torture, three counts of torture, visa fraud and attempted naturalization fraud.

Judge Hernán D. Vera said the conduct was heinous, unimaginably cruel and almost unspeakably violent. Prosecutors had asked for at least 80 years. Defence lawyers Nina Marino and Collin Cate asked for five years, citing his age and medical condition, and said he was willing to be deported to Syria.

Wing 13

Trial evidence showed that when two prisoners refused orders to harm political detainees, and after guards intercepted a third prisoner's letter of support, Alsheikh sent them to an underground section called Wing 13. Inmates there were held in small cells and tortured. The government said he watched through cameras.

Nidal Shikhani, one of the victims quoted in the prosecution sentencing memo, said he can still hear people begging to be left alone. The Justice Department called Alsheikh the highest-ranking former Assad official tried and convicted in person outside Syria.

He later served as governor of Deir ez-Zor from July 2011 to January 2013, during the early crackdown on protests. The torture counts in this case are tied to the Adra years, not the governorship.

How he reached California

Alsheikh entered the United States in 2020, obtained a green card and applied for citizenship. Prosecutors said he hid his prison record on those forms. Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI arrested him at Los Angeles International Airport in July 2024, first on immigration charges. Torture counts were added later under US laws that allow prosecution of torture committed abroad.

He has been in custody since the arrest. Credit for time served will come off the 60-year term. At 74, the sentence is in practice a life term in a US prison unless an appeal succeeds.

Why the case is unusual

Most cases against Assad-era officers have been in Europe under universal jurisdiction, often in absentia or after the defendant was already on the continent as an asylum seeker. This one put a former prison chief in a US dock, with victims in the room and a jury that heard the Wing 13 evidence in English in a Los Angeles courtroom.

Syria's new authorities have said they want to try Assad-era security men at home. Alsheikh's lawyers offered deportation as an alternative to a long American sentence. Vera chose the 60-year figure instead.

Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said Alsheikh used torture to punish and silence political dissent and then lied about it to live in the United States. The conviction does not resolve the larger file of Assad-era crimes. It does set a marker: a US court will impose decades, not a short term plus a plane ticket, when it finds a prison commander guilty of torture and immigration fraud on this record.