A/HRC/24/46 coerce. The prohibition of torture under international human rights law and humanitarian law is absolute, triggering both State and individual responsibility. 1. Government and pro-government forces 76. The Government, including its intelligence agencies, employ ed widespread, systematic torture to interrogate, intimidate and punish its perceived opponents. Torture was used in detention centres, security branches, prisons and hospitals. 77. Previously reported torture methods remained in use across the country. Many of the victims interviewed carried visible scars consistent with their accounts and exhibited symptoms of psychological trauma. 78. Interviewees consistently identified Air Force Intelligence (AFI) as one of the worst perpetrators. In Hamah, AFI detainees were beaten upon arrest and tortured during interrogations. According to an AFI defector in Hamah, personnel who used torture faced no disciplinary measures. 79. Military Security interrogated those apprehended by the army and routinely used torture. One detainee, arrested in Dara’a city in mid-May, was released from Military Security three weeks later with a broken leg and multiple cigarette burns on his back. Another former detainee described being tortured in Military Security Branch 235. 80. Victims in these centres were subjected to previously undocumented torture methods. Military Intelligence officers used water torture, such as simulated drowning, at Branch 227. Detainees in the Al-Fehar Branch in Damascus were held in solitary confinement “squatting cells”, in which it was impossible to stand upright or lie down. One detainee was held in such conditions for 10 months, beaten daily, suspended by his wrists for 17 days, burned with cigarettes and subjected to electric shocks. 81. Where detainees were brought before Government courts in Aleppo city, they bore evident marks of torture, which were ignored by the judiciary. 82. Medical professionals at some military hospitals were co-opted into the maltreatment of hospitalized detainees. 83. Security and intelligence services operated detention centres within Abdul Gadir AlShagafi Military Hospital in Al-Waar, Homs, and at Al-Mezzeh Military Hospital in Damascus. Detainees were brought in bound and blindfolded. They were registered according to the number of the detaining authority. Security personnel guard ed the detainees and acted as intermediaries between patient and doctor. 84. Cases were recorded of patients being tortured in these hospitals in coordination with various security branches. Patients were reportedly beaten in the guarded 14-bed ward of Al-Mezzeh Military Hospital. 85. The bodies of those tortured to death in Abdul Gadir Al-Shagafi Military Hospital and in State Security in Damascus were transferred to hospital morgues. Most bodies were not returned to their families. Some were returned to their family in exchange for a signed statement confirming that the victim had been killed by “terrorists”. 86. Multiple reports were received of beatings and ill-treatment at checkpoints and other points of arrest. Most victims were men accused of assisting the opposition, and they were often transferred to Military Security and tortured during interrogations. A man was arrested in January at a checkpoint in Khalidiyeh (Homs). He was detained until his death in June. His body was covered with injuries consistent with extensive beating and whipping. 12