GENEVA: Crying with grief and anger, Fatima Khan stormed forward and shouted: “You killed my son!”
As Syria’s warring sides held a sixth day of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva, the mother of a British doctor who died in the custody of President Bashar Al Assad’s regime confronted his aides yesterday.
Syria says that Abbas Khan, 32, was found hanging in a prison cell on December 16, 2013, and that he committed suicide.
His relatives are adamant he was murdered by his captors.
Having travelled from Britain to Switzerland and obtained a visitor’s pass to the UN’s European offices — where the talks were under way behind closed doors — Fatima Khan waited for hours for delegates to emerge and speak to journalists in the garden.
She seized her chance when top Assad aide Buthaina Shaaban came out for the cameras.
Shaaban appeared caught off guard, asking who the woman was.
“The doctor’s mother,” responded a man in the crowd.
Shaaban did not comment on Khan’s charge, simply murmuring: “Let’s get away from here.”
Khan was ushered away by UN security guards, as reporters from across Syria’s divide traded barbs.
A pro-regime journalist told her to get lost, sparking an irony-laced reaction from an anti-regime rival: “In Syria you lay down the law, but not here! So the doctor killed himself? Are you sure you didn’t kill him?”
Khan was detained in November 2012 just 48 hours after entering Syria from Turkey without a visa to treat victims of hospital bombings.
AFP
