Hours after his kidnap from Lebanon, Syria says 'Butcher of Baniyas' in its custody

Syrian authorities on Thursday announced the arrest of a paramilitary leader whose forces backed ousted leader Bashar al-Assad during the country's war, and who is accused of being the main culprit in a massacre of nearly 250 civilians, shortly after a Lebanese media report said the man was “kidnapped” from his house in Lebanon’s Mansourieh.

"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.

MTV had earlier reported that “unknown individuals kidnapped a Syrian citizen named Ali Khalil Ibrahim from inside his home in Mansourieh, Metn, after tying up his wife and son.”

“The kidnapped individual is wanted by Turkish authorities. He is also known as Ali al-Kayyali, nicknamed Mihraç Ural, and referred to by Syrians as the ‘Butcher of Baniyas.’ He is now inside Syrian territory, which makes this the third recorded kidnapping of Syrians from within Lebanese territory,” MTV added.

“Investigations into the matter have been initiated by the Information Branch” of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, the TV network said.

In May 2013, Syrian government and pro-government forces killed at least 248 people in mass executions in the predominantly Sunni Muslim towns of Bayda and Banias, located in the Syrian 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."

Syria's war began with pro-democracy protests in 2011, and quickly morphed into a complex armed conflict that drew in paramilitary forces, jihadists and foreign powers.

In a multiconfessional country, the war took on a sectarian nature, with the killings in Banias and Bayda often seen as a starting point of that shift.

It ended with the ousting of Assad in 2024 by an Islamist rebel group that took power in a lightning offensive.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, the death tolls in Banias and Bayda came to around 400.

Kayali fled from jail in 1982 in his home country Turkey, before moving to Syria where he would end up founding a paramilitary force allied to Assad's government.

The new authorities in Syria have arrested dozens of former security officials.

Their trials began in April.

President Ahmed al-Sharaa's media adviser Ahmed Zeydan welcomed Kayali's arrest, describing him as "a criminal... who committed massacres during the Syrian war, including those in Bayda and Banias. Every murderous criminal will be hunted down."