Slain Syrian boy once wanted to be a cop — before the crackdown
Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, the Syrian boy whose killing has enraged, mobilized and emboldened the country’s opposition movement, once harbored dreams of being a police officer.But the 13-year-old changed his ambitions when the government crackdown went into full swing.”When he saw police officers kill the people in the revolution, he would say, ‘The police kill the people and I don’t want to be like them.
I do not know what I will be but the police kill people and torture them,’” according to one of his relatives, who escaped to Kuwait amid the regime’s suppression of protesters.The relative asked not to be named out of fear for the safety of his family in Daraa, New Soccer Jerseys the southwestern city where the anti-regime demonstrations started in mid-March. Family members say Hamza got separated from his father in the chaos during demonstrations around Daraa on April 29, when protesters marched on the city to break the Syrian military siege and force the delivery of important supplies, such as medicine and milk for babies.A few weeks ago, the family received the boy’s body.
A video that showed up on YouTube displays an appalling and mutilated corpse; La Liga Soccer Jersey much of the video is too graphic to broadcast. The face is bloated and purple and his body is covered in bruises. There are gunshot wounds to his torso and his genitals are mutilated. CNN cannot independently verify what happened to Hamza or the authenticity of the video.
His death has punctuated the domestic and international outcry against the clampdown by President Bashar al-Assad’s government against peaceful protests. “I can only hope that this child did not die in vain,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week.Patrick McCormick, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, said children are not immune to the civil unrest across the region.”The pictures are shocking. They have gone all over the world. And no one could see that without being deeply moved and ashamed about what happened to that boy,” he said. “I have no idea why anybody would brutalize a young boy like that. I cannot even begin to go there. We just know that somehow it happened.”UNICEF is calling for investigations so the perpetrators can be brought to justice, “some sort of justice in a situation that’s volatile,” McCormick said.”We want to get to the bottom of it.” The relative, interviewed Thursday by CNN, described Hamza as a smart kid who loved school and soccer, and who was raised in a modest setting where he was the youngest child of a laborer.
“He was only 13 years old but he had the maturity of a 30-year-old,” the relative said.The boy supported the demonstrations and would refuse to eat during the military’s late April siege in Daraa because others didn’t have food and he felt it would be unfair to eat while they went hungry.Hamza would accompany his family to protests, waving a Syrian flag and chanting, “No Hezbollah and No Iran. We want freedom,” the relative said.The relative said he, Hamza and other members of their extended family took to the streets on the day the boy got lost and apparently swept up by Syrian officials.
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