‘I am very much alive’ teenager tells Syrian TV after claims of beheading

A TEENAGER appeared on Syrian state television yesterday claiming she was the young woman widely reported to have been mutilated and beheaded by security agents while being held in custody last month.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and Syrian activists reported that the tortured body of Zainab al-Hosni, 18, was found after she had been detained in her home city of Homs. Ms Hosni quickly became a symbol of the six-month-old uprising against president Bashar al-Assad, with protesters hailing her as the “flower of Syria”.

Amnesty had said the teenager had reportedly been detained by security agents to pressure her activist brother to turn himself in. Activists said she was the first woman to die in custody since the uprising began in March. But, in the state television interview, a black-clad young woman who identified herself as Ms Hosni said she had run away from her family home in late July because, she alleged, her brothers had abused her. She said her family did not know that she was alive and she asked her mother for forgiveness.

“I am very much alive and I have opted to tell the truth because I am planning to get married in the future and have kids who I want to be registered,” she said.

The young woman said she decided to speak out after hearing on TV that she had been arrested and beheaded. Her appearance was similar to the woman whose photos were carried by protesters in Homs, but her identity could not be independently verified.

Amnesty International said its initial statement on the death was “based on information provided by sources close to the incident itself, who passed [on] video footage of a dismembered body”. It was not immediately clear who those sources were.

The statement went on to say: “If the body was not that of Zainab al-Hosni, then clearly the Syrian authorities need to disclose whose it was, the cause and circumstances of the death, and why Zainab al-Hosni’s family were informed that she was the victim.”

The episode, and Amnesty’s statement, raised the prospect that the story may have been a hoax planted by Syrian authorities in an effort to embarrass the media and human rights group who have been reporting critically on the government’s brutal crackdown on mostly peaceful protesters that has killed nearly 3,000 people in six months.

The Syrian government blames the unrest on a foreign conspiracy and accuses the international media of spreading lies.

State media allots much of its time and resources to discounting what it says are foreign media fabrications. One recent show on a Syrian channel said footage of unrest across the country was actually shot on specially built film sets in Qatar, with help from Israel.