By READE LEVINSON and FERAS DALATEY Reuters
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DAMASCUS — More than 1,000 Syrians died in detention at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, killed by execution, torture or maltreatment at a site that was widely feared, according to a report to be published Thursday tracing the deaths to seven suspected grave sites.

In the report, shared exclusively with Reuters, the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre said it identified the grave sites by using a combination of witness testimony, satellite imagery and documents photographed at the military airport in the Damascus suburb of Mezzeh after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December.

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Some sites were on the airport grounds. Others were across Damascus.

Reuters did not examine the documents and was unable to independently confirm the existence of the mass graves through its own review of satellite imagery. But Reuters reporters did see signs of disturbed earth in images of many of the places pinpointed by SJAC. Two of the sites, one on the Mezzeh airport property and another at a cemetery in Najha, show clear signs of long trenches dug during periods consistent with witness testimony from SJAC.

Shadi Haroun, one of the report’s authors, said he was among the captives. Held over several months in 2011-2012 for organizing protests, he described daily interrogations with physical and psychological torture intended to force him into baseless confessions.

Death came in many forms, he told Reuters.

Although detainees saw nothing except their cell walls or the interrogation room, they could hear “occasional shootings, shot by shot, every couple of days.”

In addition to obtaining the documents, SJAC and the Association for the Detained and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison interviewed 156 survivors and eight former members of air force intelligence, Syria’s security service that was tasked with the surveillance, imprisonment and killing of regime critics.

The new government has issued a decree forbidding former regime officials from speaking publicly and none were available to comment.