A US federal court in Los Angeles sentenced Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, a former Syrian official who ran one of the country’s most notorious prisons, to 60 years in prison on Thursday. It is the most severe punishment handed to an official of ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s regime by a foreign court.
Al-Sheikh, 74, headed the Adra prison on the outskirts of Damascus between 2005 and 2008. A federal jury convicted him in March of one count of conspiracy to commit torture and three counts of torture, along with immigration fraud for lying about his past to obtain a green card and attempt naturalisation.
“The conduct was heinous, unimaginably cruel and almost unspeakably violent and brutal,” US District Judge Hernan D Vera said before delivering the sentence. Prosecutors had asked for a minimum of 80 years; defence lawyers Nina Marino and Collin Cate sought a five-year term, citing his age and medical and cognitive conditions.
Prosecutors said al-Sheikh oversaw an underground “punishment wing” known as “Wing 13,” where prisoners and regime opponents were interrogated and tortured as he watched through surveillance cameras. During the nine-day trial, victims described being suspended by their wrists from ceiling pipes and beaten with cables. Witnesses recounted a device that folded prisoners’ bodies in half at the waist; one victim recalled al-Sheikh stomping on it with his foot.
“Defendant knew that what he was doing was wrong,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “He ordered and participated in the torture of his victims because he had the power to do so and because he thought he would never be held accountable.”
One victim, Nidal Shikhani, said in a statement to the court that he could “still hear the screams of others begging for mercy.”
Al-Sheikh also served as governor of Syria’s Deir Ez-Zour province in 2011, during regime crackdowns on protesters. He moved to the United States in 2020 and was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in July 2024. He is the first Assad regime official to go to trial in the US and the highest-ranking to be tried in person anywhere.
Al-Assad was ousted in a rebel offensive in December 2024, ending a 14-year civil war that killed about half a million people. Syria’s new government has held in absentia trials of former officials; in August 2025 a court sentenced al-Assad and his brother Maher to death for crimes against humanity, though both have been in Moscow since the regime’s collapse.
Separately on Thursday, a court in Aleppo sentenced three people in connection with sectarian violence on Syria’s coast. One member of pro-Assad groups was sentenced to death and another to life in prison, while a government security force member convicted of murder in the revenge attacks received 20 years.