Syrian authorities on Thursday said they had arrested a paramilitary leader who backed ousted ruler Bashar al-Assad during the country's civil war and was the main suspect in a massacre of nearly 250 civilians.
"The intelligence services have arrested Ali Kayali, who also went by the name Mihrac Ural, the main suspect in the Banias massacre of 2013, while he was attempting to flee across the border," state news agency SANA said.
It did not specify which country the man was trying to flee to. Kayali fled from jail in 1982 in his home country of Turkey, before moving to Syria where he would end up founding a paramilitary force allied with Assad's government.
In May 2013, government and forces and their allies killed at least 248 people in mass executions in the predominantly Sunni Muslim towns of Bayda and Banias, located in the coastal province of Tartus, according to Human Rights Watch.
The monitor had at the time described the killings as "one of the deadliest instances of mass executions in Syria's increasingly bloody conflict".
The arrest "sends a clear message: there is no room in Syria for impunity for criminals; the rights of victims will not be lost, no matter how much time passes," Syrian Justice Minister Mazhar Alwais wrote on X.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, the death tolls in Banias and Bayda came to around 400.