DAMASCUS — Syria has freed around 11,000 detainees since President Bashar al-Assad declared a general amnesty in June, the country’s National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar said.

But authorities jailed Thursday a veteran dissident, arrested a day earlier as he tried to leave the country to visit his family abroad, his lawyer said.

Louay Hussein, 54, was detained at the border with Lebanon, from where he had planned to fly to Spain, his Building the Syrian State movement said Wednesday.

Rights groups, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, say 200,000 people are still languishing in government jails.

Speaking to AFP in Damascus on Monday, Haidar said, “11,000 people have benefitted from the amnesty and been released from prison.”

He was referring to a “general amnesty” announced by Assad a week after his contested re-election as president.

Haidar said the figure was rising gradually as the justice ministry, which is in charge of applying the presidential decree, examined prisoner files.

The Syrian government presented the amnesty as the largest since the outbreak of the country’s conflict in 2011.

But the Observatory disputed the government’s figures, saying the number of people released was closer to 7,000 people.

“Between 70,000 and 80,000 detainees were supposed to benefit from the amnesty, and only 10 percent of them have been released,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

And a number of high-profile activists, journalists and lawyers, including Khalil Maatuq and Mazen Darwish, remain behind bars despite the amnesty.