Lexington resident gets 60 years in prison for torturing inmates while chief of Syrian prison

A part-time Lexington resident who once headed a notorious Syrian prison has now been sentenced to 60 years in U.S. prison for committing torture and immigration fraud.

Samir Ousman Alsheikh was sentenced at the Los Angeles federal courthouse on Thursday, Sept. 17, six months after a jury found him guilty of multiple crimes. 

Alsheikh, 74, is the highest-ranking former member of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime to be tried and convicted in person overseas, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Alsheikh’s sentence is less than the 80 years that federal prosecutors had recommended to Judge Hernan Vera but far lengthier than the five years his attorneys had requested. 

“The conduct was heinous, unimaginably cruel and unspeakably violent and brutal,” Vera said, according to Courthouse News Service. 

Alsheikh divided his time between Lexington and Los Angeles, places where his relatives lived, U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Ciaran McEvoy earlier told the Chronicle.

Before immigrating to the U.S. in 2020, according to federal authorities, Alsheikh was chief of Damascus Central Prison, better known as Adra Prison, from 2005-08. This was during al-Assad’s nearly quarter-century rule, which collapsed in December 2024.

Investigators said Adra Prison held thousands of inmates, including political dissidents, and housed a wing where people were placed in tiny isolation cells and tortured.

During Alsheikh’s nine-day federal trial in March, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said, multiple witnesses spoke about the “severe physical and mental pain and suffering” that Alsheikh had ordered or participated in at the prison.

Victims had said the torture strategies included putting inmates in a device called the flying carpet or magic carpet: two wooden panels with hinges in the middle that folded bodies at the waist, sometimes causing spinal fractures.

One victim had testified that Alsheikh himself stomped on the “flying carpet” while the victim was restrained in the device. 

Victims had also described prison guards suspending prisoners by their wrists from pipes, then beating them with fists or cables. One person who had been suspended in this way for days had said he felt like his limbs would be torn from his body.

In his defense, Alsheikh had told the judge he’d experienced “a lot of pressure and harassment” from the al-Assad regime because of his reluctance to crack down on the political opposition, Courthouse News Service reported. 

The jury found Alsheikh guilty of all his charges: one count of conspiracy to commit torture, three counts of torture, one count of fraud in the possession and use of an immigration document and one count of attempted naturalization fraud.

“We would like to offer our gratitude to the brave victims who testified,” Heith Janke, assistant director of the FBI criminal division, said in a statement. “We hope that they are able to find some solace in the fact that it will now be their former prison warden who is incarcerated.”

Court documents indicate that Alsheikh entered the U.S. in March 2020 with an immigrant visa, or “green card,” obtained through his wife, a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 2023, he applied to become a naturalized citizen and provided a South Carolina address as his most recent residence.

Throughout the yearslong immigration process, prosecutors said, Alsheikh did not disclose his employment at Adra Prison, his persecution of people due to their political beliefs and his involvement in abusing inmates.

He was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport in July 2024, shortly before boarding a flight with a one-way ticket to the Middle East.

“The message is clear: human rights violators who come to the United States will receive no safe harbor here,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s criminal division. “We will find them, and they will be prosecuted and punished for their heinous crimes.” 

Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI investigated the case, with support from the HSI-led Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, the justice department’s international affairs office and its human rights and special prosecutions section.

Prosecutors also credited Germany’s federal criminal police office, which they said arranged for many witnesses to meet with U.S. investigators in Germany.

Tiffany Tan has been a journalist in the U.S. and abroad for more than 20 years. Contact her on Facebook at Reporter Tiffany Tan or 839-223-4652.