Reporters Without Borders, appalled at the harsh prison conditions of Massud Hamed, who was jailed in July 2003, has appealed to the Secretary General of the Arab League, Amre Moussa, to intervene on his behalf with the Syrian authorities.

Hamed, a 29-year-old journalism student, has been regularly tortured in prison and is now in a very poor state of health.

"Massud Hamed has been subjected to the barbarity of his Syrian jailers for almost two years. His only crime was to have taken photos of a peaceful demonstration and posted them online," the worldwide press freedom organisation said.

"The Arab League cannot close its eyes to abuses of this kind committed by one of its members. Mr Amre M Moussa, as a jurist you will certainly be responsive to the fact that Massoud Hamed has been sentenced to three years in prison without ever seeing his lawyer", the organisation said in a letter to the Arab League.

Hamed is detained at Adra Prison, in the Damascus suburbs, a jail run by Abu Shaghi. Local sources that prefer to remain anonymous said that the journalist spent his first year in solitary confinement and has only been in a common cell for around the past eight months.

They report that he was repeatedly tortured in the months following his arrest, chiefly by being beaten on the soles of his feet with a studded whip, which has left him with his feet completely paralysed. He also suffers from vertigo and headaches and his eyesight is failing because he has not been allowed to wear his glasses.

He sees his family once a month for ten minutes and through bars. On the other hand he has never been allowed to see his lawyer, Faisal Bedir, who has made several requests to appeal against his client's sentence but has received no reply from the Syrian judicial system.

Hamed was in the second year of journalism studies when he was arrested by local police on 24 July 2003 during an exam at Damsacus University. A month previously he had posted photos of a peaceful Kurdish demonstration in front of the UNICEF headquarters in Damascus on Kurdish-language website www.amude.com hosted in Germany. The demonstrators were calling for respect of civil and political rights for Syria's Kurdish population.

The State Security Court sentenced Hamed to three years in prison on 10 October 2004 after he was found guilty of "membership of a secret organisation" and having "attempted to annexe part of Syrian territory to another country".