Khaberni - While celebrations spread across the Tadamon neighborhood in southern Damascus since last Friday, following the arrest of Amjad Youssef, the main suspect in the 2013 Tadamon neighborhood massacre, marking one of the worst acts of violence during Bashar Al-Assad's regime, which killed 288 civilians, Ansar Shuhud, a Syrian woman who was the first to document the crimes of "the Tadamon butcher" through audio recordings and videos, commented.
Shuhud, a researcher at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam, who spent four years documenting the massacre, said she now feels safe after Youssef's arrest.
She added, "I feel a sense of security despite the distance, because I always felt that this person was behind me and was going to kill me".
However, she added that "the path to justice in Syria is unclear and does not include all perpetrators," according to what Reuters reported.
In 2022, Shuhud posed online as a fan of Youssef, gained his trust, and eventually obtained his confessions in audio and video recordings.
Youssef (40 years old), a former member of the military intelligence in Assad's regime, came into the spotlight during April 2022 after the British newspaper The Guardian published video clips provided by two academics who claimed they showed him forcing blindfolded civilians to run towards a pit in the Tadamon neighborhood in southern Damascus before shooting them.
It is worth mentioning that the Syrian Ministry of Interior announced last Friday that they had arrested the man nicknamed "the Tadamon butcher". The ministry released footage of Amjad's arrest in the Sahl al-Ghab area in Hama Governorate, western Syria, near his hometown.
A security source explained that he had been hiding there since Assad was overthrown at the end of 2024.
Local residents still refer to the massacre site as "Amjad Youssef's Pit". It has even been identified on Google Maps as "Tadamon Massacre Site".
