Syria's protesters turn to Facebook to expose 'citizen spies'

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Source: Guardian

A pair of eyes watched from a shop as a group of young men were chased down a Damascus side street by security forces. Just in time, a resident opened his door to hide them.

It was another Friday in Duma, a north-eastern suburb of the capital, where courageous protests against President Bashar al-Assad's regime show no sign of abating. But on this occasion things were about to go badly wrong for the protesters. Within minutes, their pursuers had been directed by an informer to the house where they were hiding. As some escaped to the roof of the three-storey house and jumped to the adjacent building, Jihad Shalhoub, 43, fell, grabbing a balcony banister on his way down.

A video supplied by activists to the international campaign group Avaaz captured his fate. "Jihad tried to jump, but slipped," one of the three protesters chased onto the roof told the Observer. "The security men threw stones down at Jihad until he fell." That night he died in hospital of his injuries.

With international media banned from reporting inside Syria, the account was given to the Observer in lengthy telephone interviews with local activists. They said the death of Shalhoub was one of an increasing number of cases in which citizen spies are playing a direct role in assisting the Assad regime's security forces to crack down on pro-democracy protesters.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/09/syria-informers-protests-internet-facebook