By Thomas Murphy
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East
DAMASCUS, Syria – A team of international war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts has issued a report stating that there is “direct evidence” of “systematic torture and killing” by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Their report, based on thousands of photographs of dead bodies of alleged detainees killed in Syrian government custody, would stand up in an international criminal tribunal, the group says.
“This is a smoking gun,” said David Crane, the first chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and one of the report’s authors. “Any prosecutor would like this kind of evidence — the photos and the process. This is direct evidence of the regime’s killing machine.”
The bodies in the photos showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing, according to the report.
A Syrian government defector codenamed “Caesar” provided testimony and 27,000 photographs as evidence used in the report; in all 55,000 such images were brought out of the country. According to the report, Caesar worked as photographer in the military police. Once the war started, he was required to document “killed detainees.”
A complex numbering system was also used to catalog the corpses. The system allowed intelligence agencies to identify the corpses and then later to provide false documentation that the person had died in a hospital. According to the report the system may have also served other purposes such as documenting each person’s death without involving family members, proving that orders had been followed, or perhaps it was simply the way it had always been done.
The fact that all the bodies were photographed, the report’s authors say, strongly suggests that “the killings were systematic, ordered, and directed from above.”
The report was authored by Crane, Sir Desmond de Silva, former chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice, former lead prosecutor against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
“Ultimately, the validity of our conclusions turn on the integrity of the people involved,” de Silva said. “We, the team, were very conscious of the fact there are competing interests in the Syrian crisis — both national and international. We were very conscious of that.”
For further information, please see:
Al Jazeera – Why Syria’s Assad enters Geneva talks in a position of strength – 23 January 2013
CNN – Gruesome Syria photos may prove torture by Assad – 22 January 2013
Reuters – Dooming the Syria talks before they begin – 22 January 2013
BBC – Syria photos may prove claims of torture – 21 January 2013
Guardian – Syria regime document trove shows evidence of ‘industrial scale’ killing of detainees – 20 January 2013
