NICOSIA: Patients in Syrian state hospitals are subjected to torture and mistreatment as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent, while medics are also being targeted, Amnesty International said.

A leading Syrian rights activist, meanwhile, said that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has detained more than 30,000 people since launching a deadly crackdown on opposition protests in March.

“The Syrian government has turned hospitals into instruments of repression in its efforts to crush opposition,” London-based Amnesty said in a 39-page report released on Monday night.

The report documented how wounded patients in at least four government-run hospitals had been subjected to torture and other forms of mistreatment, both by medical workers and security personnel.

And “hospital workers suspected of treating protesters and others injured in unrest-related incidents have themselves faced arrest and torture,” it said, leaving them in a dilemma.

“It is deeply alarming that the Syrian authorities seem to have given the security forces a free rein in hospitals, and that in many cases hospital staff appear to have taken part in torture and ill treatment of the very people they are supposed to care for,” said Cilina Nasser, a researcher for Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa.

“Afraid of the consequences of going to a government hospital, many people have chosen to seek treatment either at private hospitals or at poorly equipped makeshift field hospitals,” the report said.

“Syrian medical workers are being placed in an impossible situation—forced to choose between treating wounded people and preserving their own safety,” it added.

A crackdown on anti-regime protests in Syria since mid-March has left more than 3,000 dead, according to the United Nations (UN).

Radwan Ziadeh, co-founder of the Damascus Center for Human Rights, said during a media conference at UN headquarters in New York City that nobody knew the exact number of detainees.

But based on reports of activists working underground in Syria, “we [estimate] that more than 30,000 have been detained,” he added.

Assad’s government has turned all the country’s main football stadiums into prisons, Ziadeh said during the launch of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders’ annual report.

“The Syrian regime actually cancelled the football championship because they turned over all the soccer fields to be detention centers and torture centers,” added Ziadeh, who has been condemned by Syrian media close to the country’s president.

According to him, the UN Security Council’s failure to pass a resolution on the Syria crisis had made Assad’s opponents more desperate and more ready to use guns “to defend themselves against the security forces.”

Russia and China vetoed a proposed European resolution on Syria, saying that there should be no threat of sanctions against the Syrian president.