Assad regime executed missing Palestinian-Syrian activist

The Syrian regime has executed Palestinian-Syrian activist Bassel Khartabil Safadi, his wife Noura Ghazi Safadi announced on Facebook on Tuesday.

Noura wrote on Facebook that her husband was executed in October 2015, noting that he was arrested by the Syrian regime in 2012, one year after the eruption of Syria’s civil war.

Without providing a source for her information, she said that her husband had been subjected to torture during his lengthy incarceration.

Upon hearing news of his death online, several Syrian activists paid tribute to him, describing him as an “icon of peaceful opposition in Syria”.

On 15 March 2012, the Syrian authorities reportedly detained Safadi in the Mazza district of Damascus after ransacking his home and seizing his computer.

Read: Women, children executed by Assad regime 

Later the same year, Foreign Policy magazine ranked him 19th on its Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2012 due to his calls to adopt a peaceful approach to the ongoing push to oust Assad.

According to the UK-based Syrian Network for Human Rights, more than 65,000 people have been “forcibly disappeared” in Syria since the conflict began in 2011.

Safadi was arrested a couple of days before getting married with Noura, however she insisted on signing the marriage certificate while he was in prison.

Thank you for killing my beloved. Thanks to your actions, I became the bride of the revolution and thanks to your action, I became a widow. What a loss for Syria! What a loss for Palestine! What a loss for me!

she wrote on Facebook.