Syria's justice ministry has rejected a report by Amnesty International that alleged as many as 13,000 people have been executed at a government prison. The ministry said the claims were ‘completely untrue and intended to harm Syria's reputation’. Amnesty said mass hangings took place every week at Saydnaya prison between September 2011 and December 2015, and that the executions had been authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government. 84 people, including former guards, detainees, and prison officials, were interviewed for the report. In a statement carried by the official Sana news agency, the justice ministry dismissed the claims as ‘baseless’ and said that all executions in Syria followed due process. Last year UN human rights experts said witness accounts and other evidence strongly suggested that tens of thousands of people were being detained, and that ‘deaths on a massive scale’ were occurring in custody.