Britain on Wednesday accused Syria of effectively murdering an Indian-origin surgeon who died in jail after over a year of detention in the war-torn country where he was volunteering at a hospital.
Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad had said 32-year-old orthopaedic surgeon Abbas Khan committed suicide, but British junior Foreign Office Minister Hugh Robertson said the regime of President Bashar Assad was responsible for the death of the U.K. national.
Mr. Robertson said, “There is no excuse whatsoever for the treatment that he has suffered by the Syrian authorities who have in effect murdered a British national who was in their country to help people injured during their civil war.”
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Mr. Robertson said the government was seeking “urgent clarification” about what had happened to Khan, but his death was “at best extremely suspicious”.
Khan’s family said they were “shocked and devastated”, as Syrian authorities had promised to release him this week but then days later told the family he was dead.
Khan’s brother Shahnawaz said, “The fact that this individual was out there helping the humanitarian effort and has been held for 13 months against his will without a charge or a trial or access to a lawyer, and they have offered very little assistance, placated us throughout.”
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“We had politicians due to go over to Damascus to go and get him. He knew about that. He was in high spirits. We thought he was coming home this Friday,” he said.
“Syrians are calling it a case of suicide — the statement released a ridiculous story of how he killed himself,” his sister Sara said.
Respect Party MP George Galloway, who has liaised with the Syrian authorities and was due to collect Khan on Friday, said the death was “murder most foul” and it was “inconceivable that he committed suicide”.
The MP for Bradford West said he believed somebody within the regime had killed Khan to defy President Assad’s decision to release him.
Mr. Shahnawaz blamed the British Foreign Office for not acting quickly enough.
“It is interesting for the Foreign Office to take that line now. We have been telling them for 13 months that this is a very real possibility. And they have treated his case like he’s been some wayward traveller in Dubai being caught drunk, and contravened some trivial law in Syria,” he told the BBC.
Khan, who worked at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in northwest London, was detained 48 hours after entering Syria without a visa last November.
He was moved by the plight of refugees in the camps in Turkey, his family said. He initially had not planned to go to Syria, but later decided to help treat badly injured civilians of the war-torn country.
Khan was one of seven brothers and sisters and is survived by his wife Hanna, his seven-year-old son Abdullah and daughter Ruqquaya, aged six.
For five months, Khan’s family feared that he was dead.
Eventually, they tracked him down to a military prison, where he said he had been starved and beaten while being detained without charge. His mother Fatima, a British-Indian, had travelled to Syria to try and secure his release.
Another British doctor of Indian-origin Isa Abdur Rahman, who had travelled to a rebel-held area in northern Syria was killed in May this year.