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Syria's Interior Ministry announced Friday the arrest of Amjad Youssef, identified as the main suspect in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, in which at least 41 civilians were shot and burned in a mass grave in the Damascus neighborhood.
Interior Minister Anas Khattab said, "The criminal Amjad Youssef is now in our hands after a well-prepared security operation" conducted in the Ghab Plain in rural Hama.
Khattab announced the arrest on X.
"The criminal Amjad Youssef, the number-one suspect in the Tadamon Massacre committed in Damascus, in which dozens of innocent martyrs were killed, is now in our hands after a well-prepared security operation," he wrote.
The Interior Ministry said the operation involved days of surveillance and tracking before the arrest was executed in the Ghab Plain in rural Hama.
The ministry said it would "continue to pursue other perpetrators of the massacre, to arrest them and bring them to justice."
On April 16, 2013, forces of the Assad regime killed at least 41 civilians in the Tadamon neighborhood in southern Damascus, a district home to a significant Turkmen population.
Youssef, a former intelligence officer of the Assad regime whose face was clearly visible in the leaked footage, was seen ordering handcuffed, blindfolded men to run before shooting them.
The victims fell into a mass grave where the bodies were then burned.
The footage emerged publicly in 2022, drawing international condemnation.
In October 2023, it was revealed that Youssef was still working at a military base. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the same year that Youssef and his family had been banned from entering the United States.
Human Rights Watch teams discovered what they described as "a significant number of bodies" in Tadamon following Assad's fall in December 2024. Families from the neighborhood had also informed the new authorities of several additional massacres committed during the early years of the civil war.
Türkiye's Ambassador to Damascus Nuh Yilmaz congratulated Syria's Internal Security Forces on the operation, noting on X that the Tadamon massacre, in which dozens were shot blindfolded and burned on video, was "one of the most horrific massacres of the Syrian war."
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