Residents gather in a street after Friday prayers to celebrate the arrest of Amjad Yousef, a key suspect in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, in Tadamon, Syria, April 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi

Syria’s Interior Ministry said on Friday it had arrested the main suspect in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, one of the worst acts of violence attributed to the former government of Bashar al-Assad, in which 288 civilians were killed.

The ministry released footage of Amjad Yousef’s arrest in the Al-Ghab Plain area of Hama province in western Syria, near his hometown. Yousef had been hiding there since the overthrow of Assad at the end of 2024, a security source told Reuters.

US Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack welcomed the arrest in a post on X, calling it an important step towards accountability for atrocities committed during Syria’s war.

DOCUMENTING THE MASSACRE

Yousef, 40, a former member of military intelligence under Assad, was thrust into the spotlight in April 2022 when the UK’s Guardian newspaper published videos provided by two academics that they said showed him forcing blindfolded civilians to run towards a pit in the Tadamon neighborhood of southern Damascus before shooting them.

Annsar Shahoud, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam Holocaust and Genocide Center and one of the academics, spent four years documenting the massacre.

Posing as an online fangirl, Shahoud gained Yousef’s trust and ultimately obtained his confessions both on video and audio recording.

Reuters was unable to reach Yousef for comment as he has been taken into custody.

The massacre is one of the most egregious documented incidents of violence attributed to the Assad government during the 14-year bloody war that began in 2011.

After Assad’s fall at the end of 2024, civilians, media outlets and international organizations went to the site of the massacre to inspect it and interview witnesses. Locals refer to the site as “Amjad Yousef’s Pit.” It has been marked on Google Maps as “The Site of the Tadamon Massacre.”

Ahmed Adra, a Tadamon resident and a member of the neighborhood committee, said victims’ families had been celebrating in the streets since morning.

“We will take white roses and plant them at the site of the massacre and tell the victims that their memory is alive and that justice is being served,” he told Reuters.

Shahoud said she now felt safe with Yousef in custody, but added the path to justice in Syria was unclear and did not include all perpetrators.

“I feel safe now, despite the distance, because I always felt for years that this person was after me,” she told Reuters.