Photos charge Assad of Mass Torture: Zaman Al Wasl

By Al Hussein Al Shishakli

(Zaman Al Wasl- Exclusive)- Zaman al-Wasl newspaper has obtained new photos of mass torture by Syrian intelligence services linked to war crime report made last year by a team of internationally recognized war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts.  

The images, which illustrate apparent actions would be serious international crimes, show lifeless bodies with signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation and other forms of torture and killing.

Some of the photographs will take back the reader to the torture memos of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003 when the smiling soldiers used to take photos with tormented inmates. Here the Syrian soldiers are doing the same.

The photos showed Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers encasing the emaciated corpses in plastic bags before the final trip to mass graveyard.

In mid 2013, a team of war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts, had analyzed thousands of digital photos taken and provided by a Syrian defector codenamed "Caesar," who, along with his family, is now living outside Syria in an undisclosed location, according to CNN.

The team members shared their findings in a joint exclusive with CNN's "Amanpour" and The Guardian newspaper on January 20 2014.

The images showed emaciation, severely low body weight with a hollow appearance indicating starvation. The majority of all of the victims were men most likely between ages 20 and 40, according to the report.

The experts contend their analysis -- based on thousands of photographs of the dead bodies of alleged detainees killed in Syrian government custody -- would stand up in an international criminal tribunal.

Sir Desmond de Silva, the former chief prosecutor of Sierra Leone special court, in interview with CNN, likened the images to those of Holocaust survivors and Nazi death camps after World War II."

Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court. The only way the court could prosecute someone from Syria would be through a referral from the United Nations Security Council.

More than 200,000 people have been killed in Syria since the revolt against al-Assad began in March 2011, the United Nations says. 

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