Cartoonist's hands crushed for drawing anti-govt cartoons

The hands of Ali Ferzat, Syria's best known political cartoonist, has been crushed to allegedly stop him from drawing cartoons against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government

The hands of Ali Ferzat, Syria's best known political cartoonist, has been crushed to allegedly stop him from drawing cartoons against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government.
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He was reportedly picked up off the street in Damascus and dragged into a 4x4 by armed masked men on Thursday morning.
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They beat him as they drove to the airport road and said: "We will break your hands so that you'll stop drawing," Sky News reports.
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Then they broke both the bones in both of his hands. His beard was singed, a bag was put over his head before he was dumped by the roadside and told: "This is just a warning."
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Ferzat is currently in hospital.
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Although his relatives said that they can't identify of the assailants, they suspect they were government thugs responding to the cartoonist's public stance against the regime of President Assad, and the recent crackdown on anti-regime demonstrations.
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This week he had published an online cartoon showing the Syrian president with a suitcase hitching a ride with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi. Caricatures of the Syrian president are forbidden by law, and although Ferzat has drawn the president before, the latest one might have gone beyond the levels to which the Assad's loyalists could tolerate.
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His website, https://www.ali-ferzat.com/ is now inaccessible.
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Earlier this month, Ferzat has said that: "There are two things in this life that cannot be crushed... the will of God and the will of the people."