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Bassel Khartabil

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Bassel Khartabil

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Also known as Bassel Safadi

free culture and democracy activist, Syrian political prisoner

OverviewAI-generated

Bassel Khartabil, born in Damascus in 1981, was a Syrian and Palestinian software developer, engineer, and computer scientist. He was active in the free-culture movement and sharism, serving as a member of Creative Commons Corporation and Wikipedia. Khartabil spoke Arabic and English and resided in Damascus. He was married to Noura Ghazi.

During the Syrian civil war, Khartabil was arrested and held in Adra Prison and Sednaya Prison. He disappeared on October 3, 2015. He died in 2015 at Sednaya Prison through capital punishment.

Synthesized by Vinony from 24 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

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Quotes

  • The people who are in real danger never leave their countries. They are in danger for a reason and for that they don’t leave.

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Key facts

Born
( 1981-05-22 ) 22 May 1981, Damascus , Syria
Died
3 October 2015 (2015-10-03) (aged 34) , Adra Prison , Syria
Cause of death
Executed by the Syrian Arab Republic
Occupation
Software engineer
Known for
Aiki Framework , Openclipart , Mozilla , Creative Commons
Spouse
Noura Ghazi ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 2013 ) ​
Awards
Index on Censorship 2013 Digital Freedom Award

via Wikipedia infobox

~14 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Bassel Khartabil (Arabic: باسل خرطبيل; 22 May 1981 – 3 October 2015), also known as Bassel Safadi (باسل صفدي), was a Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer. He was detained without trial by the Syrian government in 2012 and was secretly executed in 2015. Human rights organizations say that he was detained for his activities in support of freedom of expression, and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considered his detention to have been arbitrary.

Khartabil was born in Damascus to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, and was raised in Syria, where he specialized in open source software development. He was chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder of collaborative research company Aiki Lab and was CTO of Al-Aous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeological sciences and arts in Syria. He served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, and contributed to Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, and Openclipart. He is credited with "opening up the Internet in Syria and vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people."

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Bassel Khartabil” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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