Syrian activists : 30 000 arrested since March 2011

ADO – agencies: The Syrian government has detained more than 30,000 people since launching a deadly crackdown on opposition protests in March, a leading Syrian rights activist said Monday, as Washington condemned the Syrian army’s incursions into Lebanon and said that dissidents of the Damascus regime had either been killed or taken prisoner at the border.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government has turned all the country’s main football stadiums into prisons, Radwan Ziadeh, co-founder of the Damascus Center for Human Rights and scholar at George Washington University in Washington, told a press conference at the U.N. headquarters, according to AFP.

Speaking at the launch of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders annual report, Ziadeh said nobody knew the exact figure for the number of detainees.

The United Nations says that more than 3,000 people have been killed.

Based on reports from activists working underground in Syria, Ziadeh said: “We have an estimate number that more than 30,000 have been detained.”

“My brother is in prison since August 30 and I have no information about him.” He added that he also had no news of an uncle and three cousins, one of them 14 years old, who had also been held.

“You can imagine, five relatives only from one family in one small city. This is why the number that has been detained — 30,000 — is an estimate number,” said Ziadeh, who has been condemned by Syrian media close to the country’s president.

“The Syrian regime actually cancelled the football championship because they turned over all the soccer fields to be detention centers and torture centers,” he said.