The attorney general of the central Syrian province of Hama said he has resigned to protest against hundreds of killings and thousands of arrests by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, after the state agency said the official was kidnapped.

“I, the attorney general of the province of Hama, Mohammed Adnan al-Bakkour, announce my resignation from the regime of Assad and his band,” he said in a video posted on YouTube late Wednesday.

He said he took the decision after hundreds of jailed peaceful demonstrators were killed by the authorities and buried in mass graves, and 10,000 were arrested arbitrarily.

The United Nations says that more than 2,200 people have been killed since the beginning of near-daily popular protests against Mr Assad’s regime in mid-March.

But the official Sana news agency, which reported on Monday that Mr Bakkour had been kidnapped en route to work, quoted officials as saying his statement had been made under duress.

It quoted Hama governor, Anas Naeem, as saying that “Bakkour was forced by his captors to give false information... showing the liquidation of citizens in Hama in the context of a media campaign against Syria”. It quoted another official as saying that Mr Bakkour’s words “were extracted under armed threat,” calling them “pure lies fabricated by armed terrorist gangs involved in his abduction.”