Gunmen break cartoonist’s hands over mocking Assad

MASKED gunmen dragged Syria’s best-known political cartoonist from his car, beat him severely and broke both his hands as a warning to stop drawing just days after he compared Syria’s president to Muammar Gaddafi, a relative and activists said.

Hospitalised with serious injuries, 60-year-old Ali Ferzat has become the most famous victim of the repression of Syria’s five-month uprising. The attack was a reminder that no Syrian is immune to the crackdown.

“This is just a warning,” the gunmen told Ferzat, according to a relative who asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisals. “We will break your hands so you’ll stop drawing.”

The men then singed the artist’s beard, put a bag over his head and dumped him on a roadside.

The widely popular cartoonist, who works late into the night, left his studio at 4am. A jeep with tinted windows soon started trailing him and cut him off on a Damascus street. Four masked gunmen dragged him out of his car, bundled him into the jeep and drove him just outside Damascus, beating him.

After news of the attack broke, online social networking sites exploded with angry postings.

“Assad’s Syria is the burial ground of talent,” read a posting on Twitter.

“Ali Ferzat, your innovation will stand in the face of their cowardice and hate,” wrote Suheir Atassi, a prominent Syrian pro-democracy activist.

Omar Idilbi, a spokesman for the Local Co-ordination Committees, an activist group that helps organise and track the uprising, blamed security forces for the attack.

Ferzat has published a cartoon on his website showing Assad with a packed suitcase, hitching a ride with a fleeing Gaddafi.