Pilgrims Abductors Deny Receiving Ransom, Say Regime Freed No Women Detainees

A Syrian rebel group said Monday that Damascus had failed to free dozens of female detainees who were supposed to have been released from regime jails as part of a weekend hostage exchange involving the nine Lebanese pilgrims and two Turkish pilots.

The Northern Storm brigade, based in the north of Syria, had expected the prisoners' release after they freed the Lebanese men they had kidnapped 17 months ago.

"We sent a delegation representing both us and the women (detainees), as well as Syrian Muslim scholars, to welcome the women at the agreed time in Adana airport (in Turkey)," but no one arrived, said the Northern Storm brigade.

Northern Storm agreed to release the nine Lebanese men under a deal brokered with Turkish, Qatari and Lebanese mediation.

On Saturday, Lebanese authorities repeatedly thanked Damascus for accepting the rebels' demand to free 100 to 200 women detainees held in regime jails.

A day earlier, caretaker Interior Minister Marwan Charbel had said that General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim would hand over a list of some 200 women detainees to Damascus, and that the Syrian authorities were "cooperating very well" on the issue.

Ibrahim himself thanked Syrian President Bashar Assad for “facilitating” his mission.

But since then Syrian authorities have made no official statements on the matter.

However, on Saturday, Charbel and Ibrahim confirmed that the three-way deal will be fully implemented through the liberation of the Syrian women detainees.

Asked about the fate of the women held in Syrian government jails, Ibrahim said: “What we had agreed upon has been fully implemented.”

He did not give further details. But Charbel explained that although the detainees haven't yet been released, the Syrian regime would implement the deal.

Syria has certain judicial, administrative and logistical procedures that have delayed their release, he said.

Northern Storm also stressed "the need for efforts by all sides to ensure the women prisoners are freed immediately, and to relieve the Syrian people's pain with their return to their families and children."

Tens of thousands of people are being detained by the Syrian regime, many of them without trial, activists say.

The group's statement said a deal had been in the offing for some time, but that an al-Qaida front group's advance in its area of operations in Aazaz, northern Syria, forced it to act more quickly.

"Because of an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant occupation of our bases, we were forced to hasten the exchange," said Northern Storm, which battled for weeks to halt ISIL's advance.

Northern Storm also denied receiving any payment in exchange for the hostages, "as some provocative Lebanese media had claimed."

On Saturday, al-Liwaa newspaper quoted a Turkish source as saying that Qatar crowned its negotiations with the kidnappers by paying them 150 million dollars for the release of the pilgrims who were abducted in Syria's Aleppo region in May 2012.

Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat has also said that the Northern Storm brigade "received 100 million euros" as part of the deal.