The Bashar Al Assad regime killed all six children of a female chess champion who has been missing since 2013, authorities in Syria believe.
A commission for missing people announced it had a “high degree of certainty” that Rania Al Abbasi's children were dead.
The children were aged between two and 14 when the family was arrested by Assad intelligence forces in 2013, during Syria's civil war. Ms Al Abbasi, a dentist and chess player, was seen as an opponent of the Assad regime.
Her fate remains unknown, although relatives fear she and her husband Abdul Rahman Yasin also died in custody. Their disappearance is among the most prominent missing person cases being investigated by Syria's new authorities.
Syrian officials have declared Amjad Yousef, a recently captured member of Assad's military intelligence, a suspect in the killing of the six children.
Mr Yousef is the prime suspect in one of the war's worst atrocities, the 2013 Tadamon massacre, in which 288 people were killed in a Damascus suburb. Footage that emerged in 2022 purportedly showed him forcing blindfolded victims into a pit before they were shot dead.
Syria's Interior Ministry said there were signs he had “direct involvement” in the killing of the Al Abbasi family. The ministry said it was pursuing other potential suspects from “groups and militias affiliated with the ousted regime”.
The head of a justice commission, Abdul Basit Abdul Latif, said the children "are not numbers in a file ... they are victims awaiting truth and justice". The commission described the case as one of Syria's most painful humanitarian tragedies, reflecting the suffering of thousands of families.
All contact with the Al Abbasi family was lost after their 2013 arrest, but it is believed they were held in the Assad regime's secret prisons. Human rights groups including Amnesty International had campaigned for their release.
The reason for their arrest was uncertain. Relatives said the family was not politically active, but had helped people displaced by the Assad government's siege of Homs. One of those people may have been a rebel militant.
The new Syrian government under President Ahmad Al Shara has made justice for Assad-era crimes a priority since coming to power in 2024. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Syrians disappeared under Assad rule.
Mr Yousef is one of several prominent figures captured in recent months, including an Assad cousin involved in armed robberies and an air force commander linked to chemical attacks. Bashar Al Assad himself fled to Russia in 2024 and has not surfaced in public since.
The first trial of an Assad-era general, Atif Najib, began in Damascus last month. Mr Najib is accused of war crimes during a crackdown on protesters, in which children were allegedly tortured and stripped of their fingernails.
The Syrian government also revealed last week it had located remnants of the Assad government's secret chemical weapons programme. The discovery included raw materials and munitions similar to those used to carry out deadly gas attacks, and ingredients used to make sarin nerve gas were among the finds.
