1. Bassel Khartabil, known as Bassel Safadi, was a Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer.
20 Facts About Bassel Khartabil
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Bassel Khartabil was detained without trial by the Syrian government in 2012 and was secretly executed in 2015.
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Bassel Khartabil was chief technology officer and co-founder of collaborative research company Aiki Lab and was CTO of Al-Aous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeological sciences and arts in Syria.
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Bassel Khartabil served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, and contributed to Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, Openclipart, Fabricatorz, and Sharism.
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Bassel Khartabil was arrested a few days before his marriage contract to Noura Ghazi, a lawyer and human rights activist, was to be signed.
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The contract was finalized later that year, while Bassel Khartabil was in prison.
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Bassel Khartabil, I am very afraid, I am afraid about the country that is being slaughtered, divided, bleeding, being destroyed.
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Ouch Bassel Khartabil, I am very afraid that our dream is changing from seeing ourselves being the generation freeing their country to the one witnessing its destruction.
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Bassel Khartabil's father was a scholar who wrote about atheism and Bassel himself was an atheist.
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On 21 March 2013, Bassel Khartabil was awarded Index on Censorship's Digital Freedom Award.
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On 15 March 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained amid arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus by Military Security Branch 215.
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Bassel Khartabil was interrogated and allegedly tortured for five days by Military Branch 215.
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Bassel Khartabil was then transferred to the Interrogation Division Branch 248 and detained there incommunicado for 9 months.
14.
On 9 December 2012, Bassel Khartabil was brought before a military prosecutor who charged him with "spying for an enemy State" under Articles 272 and 274 of the Syrian Criminal Code.
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Bassel Khartabil was then sent to the Adra Prison in Damascus.
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On 21 April 2015, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted an opinion on Bassel Khartabil's case, calling his detention "arbitrary" and asking for his immediate release.
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In October 2012, Amnesty International released a document with information suggesting that Bassel Khartabil has been ill-treated and even tortured.
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Two days afterward, unconfirmed rumors surfaced that Bassel Khartabil had been sentenced to death.
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Bassel Khartabil's efforts were put on hold when he was imprisoned, and some of his early work was lost.
20.
Bassel Khartabil wrote hundreds of letters while in prison, including some while he was in a high-security military prison, where writing was prohibited.