The fuel station, where the massacre took place, is located in the north of Al Mlaiha town on the road between Al Mlaiha and Zabdeen towns about 800 meters away from town square.
Incident’s details according to SNHR’s member in Damascus suburbs:
“On Wednesday 2 January 2013, two long lines were waiting in front of Al Nawras fuel station. Cars line and a line of persons carrying “gallons” to fill it with gasoline due to its cut for a long time in town. About 2:00 pm Meg warplanes luanched an airstrike on the station. People came to save civilians and evacuated them from under the rubble, the regime artilleries retaliated them and launched two rockets on the same place.
Ali, a field medic, was in Al Mlaiha road about 600m from the fuel station when he heard the sound of Meg shelling the target, he hurried to the location and saw tens of people, burned cars, and scattered people’s shreds. The shops’ owners hurried to extinguish the fire in primitive means to avoid fire in a fuel tank. He said that the smell of death was more than the smell of smoke, most of exiting persons turned into “coal body” in few minutes. Ali started to relief people, he was astonished as he has never seen a similar sight since the beginning of the revolution. Thus at the beginning, most of exiting people couldn’t help the injured ones due to the horror of what they saw. 30 corpses were founded over each other after they pulled the burned cars, it seemed that the martyrs took shelter for each other and cars as the place was shelled. He narrated that the hardest thing in this case is the difficulties of distinguishing between a martyr and another, all of them are without any features, the martyr of Al Mliaha area wasn’t identified from the martyr of IDPs from Zabdeen area. SNHR’s team in Damascus suburbs were able to document the death of 44 residents while the activist talked about 31 corpses that have not been identified as they turned into shreds. The toll of martyrs was 75, 44 persons amongst them were identified.