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A former Assad regime official who ran one of Syria’s most notorious prisons has been sentenced to 60 years in a US federal prison for torturing inmates.

Getting into it: US District Judge Hernán D. Vera handed down the sentence Thursday in Los Angeles against Samir Ousman Alsheikh, 74, a former brigadier general who was in charge of Damascus Central Prison, better known as Adra Prison, from roughly 2005 to 2008. A jury convicted him in March on six counts, including conspiracy to commit torture, three counts of torture, and two counts tied to lying his way into a green card and trying to become a US citizen.

The Justice Department says he is the highest-ranking former member of Bashar al-Assad’s government to be tried and convicted in person anywhere outside Syria, and he is one of only five people ever prosecuted under the US Torture Act, which lets the government go after torture committed abroad when the accused is on American soil.

Prosecutors said Alsheikh had certain inmates moved to Wing 13, an underground block where they were locked alone in cramped cells and tortured. Former prisoners testified that guards hung prisoners by their wrists from ceiling pipes for hours or days and beat them with cables, stuffed them into car tires, and strapped them to a hinged wooden device known as the “flying carpet” that jackknifed their bodies at the waist. One victim said Alsheikh personally stomped on the device while he was strapped to it, and another said he was forced into the red jumpsuit reserved for prisoners marked for execution after writing a letter supporting a political prisoner.

“I still hear the screams of others begging for mercy,” one of the victims, Nidal Shikhani, said in a statement to the court.

Prosecutors had pushed for at least 80 years, while his lawyers asked for five, pointing to his age and health and saying he was willing to be deported to Syria. According to AP, his defense team plans to appeal.

This all comes as Alsheikh entered the US in 2020 after hiding his role in the abuse on his visa application and lied about it again when he applied for citizenship in 2023. Federal agents arrested him at Los Angeles International Airport in July 2024 as he was about to board a one-way flight to Beirut.