Yusef Eido is a 25-year-old humanitarian worker from the al-Khalidiya neighbourhood in Aleppo city.At the time of his arrest, he was working with a local humanitarian aid group to co-ordinate the delivery of food baskets to members of his community.One month prior to his arrest, he was hit in the eye by a sniper bullet in his local marketplace and told that he would need to travel to Germany for surgery.On 26 December 2012, he went to the local authorities to arrange his visa and never returned.

A close relative told Amnesty International:

When he didn’t come home soon after his call, we knew something was wrong immediately. We went to all the prison branches, the police offices, the checkpoints, and we asked one by one.They each said the same thing: ‘He’s not with us’… We later heard from a released detainee that Yusef was in a branch of the Political Security in Damascus, so we went to the judge to submit the documents about the case. When we got to the reception desk, he just threw the papers back in our faces.

At the end of 2014, Yusef’s mother visited Damascus to look for her son.She was told by an official there that he was being held in Military Intelligence Branch 215 and would soon be transferred to Adra prison.When she returned several days later, she found that the official with whom she had spoken earlier was no longer employed.His replacement denied that Yusef was in custody. Since then, the family heard from a released detainee that Yusef was still in Branch 215 and had been tortured; they are, however, unsure whether this news is reliable.