Yesterday, open source advocate and software engineer Bassel Khartabil spent his 32nd birthday in prison. He was arrested by Syrian security forces on 15 March last year, and he has been in jail ever since. Khartabil was awarded an Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award, sponsored by Google for his important work earlier this year. The Free Bassel campaign has started an initiative to shed light on Bassel’s situation called Free Bassel Sunlight, where they have called on supporters to advocate for Bassel’s release through using their resources to unearth more details about his situation.

We shared some birthday wishes to Bassel yesterday, but many more wishes were posted online yesterday —- here are just some of the heartfelt messages sent to him: