BEIRUT, Lebanon — Emaciated corpses lie in the sand, their ribs protruding over sunken bellies, their thighs as thin as wrists. Several show signs of strangulation. The images conjure memories of some of history’s worst atrocities.
Numbers inscribed on more than 11,000 bodies in 55,000 photographs said to emerge from the secret jails of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, suggest that torture, starvation and execution are widespread and even systematic, each case logged with bureaucratic detail.
This collection of images was identified as having been part of a voluminous archive of torture and execution maintained by the Syrian government and smuggled out by a police photographer who defected and was given the code name Caesar.
So far, only a few photographs have actually been released by lawyers commissioned by the Qatari government, an avowed opponent of Mr. Assad, and the claims about their origins could not be independently verified.
If genuine, the trove is new visual corroboration that Mr. Assad’s government is guilty of mass war crimes against its own citizens, just as it appeared to regain some international standing.
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Source: The New York Times, January 21, 2014
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