LOS ANGELES (AP) — A former Syrian military official convicted of torturing prisoners during the rule of former President Bashar Assad was sentenced Thursday to 60 years in a U.S. prison.

A jury in March found Samir Ousman Alsheikh guilty if one count of conspiracy to commit torture and three counts of torture while in charge of Syria's infamous Adra Prison from roughly 2005 to 2008.

“The conduct was heinous, unimaginably cruel, and almost unspeakably violent and brutal,” a federal judge in Los Angeles said before announcing the sentence.

Defense attorneys said they will appeal the sentence.

Human rights groups and United Nations officials have accused the Syrian government of widespread abuses in its detention facilities, including torture and arbitrary detention of thousands of people, in many cases without informing their families.

Prosecutors said Alsheikh, seeking to quash political dissent, sent certain prisoners to a wing of Adra where they were held in small isolation cells and tortured.

Alsheikh came to the U.S. in 2020 and applied for citizenship, but prosecutors say he concealed his involvement in torture. Federal authorities detained him at Los Angeles International Airport in July 2024.

In a three-hour hearing, the judge heard statements of support from Alsheikh’s son and daughter. There were also recorded statements from former inmates who described the brutality they suffered and witnessed at the prison.

During the trial, three victims recounted beatings while suspended from pipes on the ceiling and the use of a device that folded their bodies in half at the waist. One person testified that Alsheikh stomped on the device with his foot, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Defendant knew that what he was doing was wrong,” DOJ prosecutors said in a sentencing memo filed this month. “Nonetheless 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.”

The memo included statements from several victims, one of whom, Nidal Shikhani, said he can “still hear the screams of others begging for mercy, repeating, ‘Leave me, leave me.’”

Prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge Hernan D. Vera for a minimum sentence of 80 years. Alsheikh's attorneys, Nina Marino and Collin Cate, called for a five-year sentence, noting that he is 74 years old and has “significant medical and cognitive conditions.” They also said he was willing to be deported to Syria, where a new government has sought to hold Assad-era security officials accountable.

“Whatever moral weight this case carries in the broader arc of history — however much the world, or the victims, or the public might wish the sentence to ‘send a message’ — that desire cannot be the foundation of a just sentence,” Marino and Cate wrote in their Sept. 3 memo.

Jurors also convicted Alsheikh in March of lying to U.S. immigration authorities and fraudulently obtaining a green card and attempting to naturalize as a U.S. citizen.

Assad was ousted in a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024, bringing a 14-year civil war to an end, but the country has continued to suffer from sporadic outbreaks of violence.

In March 2025, armed groups aligned with Assad ambushed the new government’s security forces on Syria’s coast. A government counteroffensive then spiraled into sectarian revenge attacks and the massacre of hundreds of civilians from the Alawite religious minority, to which Assad belongs.

On Thursday, three people were sentenced in the Syrian city of Aleppo in connection with the violence. Two members of the pro-Assad groups were sentenced to death and life in prison, while a member of the security forces who took part in the revenge attacks was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

___

Thanawala reported from Atlanta.