Following the new death from torture of a Kurdish political prisoner in Syria the chairperson of the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV), Tilman Zülch, appealed today to the Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, to speak out for the release of 151 political prisoners known by name to the Society for Threatened Peoples. Among them are two friends of the human rights organisation STP.

The fate of the politically active Kurd Muhammad Misto Rashid is representative of the treatment of Kurdish political prisoners in Syria . He was arrested in December 2008, mishandled and tortured. According to our latest information he died last Wednesday, 19th January 2010 in the central prison of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo as the result of his injuries. The Society for Threatened Peoples has constantly drawn attention to such deaths following torture in Syrian prisons. There are said to be over 3,000 political prisoners being held there.

The Society for Threatened Peoples calls on the German government urgently to cancel immediately the agreement made with the dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2008 on the return of refugees. The mass deportations of Christian, Yezidi and Kurdish refugees to the torturing state must also be stopped immediately.