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President Assad's regime has executed up to 13,000 people in mass hangings carried out in the basement of a notorious prison, a chilling new report claims.

The victims, largely made up of Syrian government opponents, were sentenced to death following military trials lasting just minutes over the past four years.

They were then told they were being taken to prison - but instead were put into a minibus and taken to a basement execution room where they were hanged in groups of between 20 and 50 at a time.

(Image: REUTERS)

The appalling claims are contained in a shocking report published today by Amnesty International following a year-long investigation entitled: "Human slaughterhouse: Mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya prison"

Amnesty spoke to dozens of former prisoners, judges and prison guards.

It will add to a growing body of evidence which campaigners say should result in President Assad being prosecuted for war crimes.

The report claims mass executions have been happening at the infamous Saydnaya prison near Damascus since 2011 when the uprising against Assad began in Syria.

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One former guard told how each night a prisoner would have to count the number of slippers left outside the execution room.

"If there were 30 slippers, then we knew that 15 people had been executed," the former officer said.

"There were usually between 30 and 80 slippers outside."

The execution room is known as “the White Building” and the hangings usually took place on Monday or Wednesday nights.

(Image: Amnesty International) (Image: Amnesty International)

Detainees on the floor above the “execution room” say they sometimes heard the sounds of the hangings.

One witness, a former military officer who had been arrested called Hamid, said: “If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling.

“This would last around ten minutes … We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then.”

(Image: REUTERS)

An ex-judge who witnessed the hangings said: “They kept them hanging there for ten to 15 minutes. Some didn’t die because they are light. For the young ones, their weight wouldn’t kill them.

“The officers’ assistants would pull them down and break their necks.”

Hassan Job, a former dentist, told The Times how he also saw dozens of dead bodies at another detention centre in Damascus.

'Everyday I saw 20 to 30 dead bodies, every day for nine months," he said.

"Can you imagine how many people were dying?"

Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International’s regional office in Beirut, said: “The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population.

“The cold-blooded killing of thousands of defenceless prisoners, along with the carefully crafted and systematic programmes of psychological and physical torture that are in place inside Saydnaya Prison cannot be allowed to continue."