A CNN interview with experts who reviewed graphic post-mortem photographs said to show the bodies of prisoners who died in the custody of Syrian security forces.
Thousands of post-mortem photographs of scarred, emaciated corpses, provided to the Syrian opposition by a man who describes himself as a defector from the security forces of President Bashar al-Assad, appear to offer “direct evidence†of torture and execution on a mass scale, a team of legal and forensic experts concluded in a report made public on Monday.
The report, which was first made available to The Guardian and CNN, was written by a six-person panel of experts assembled by a law firm working for the government of Qatar, a main sponsor of the Syrian opposition. The team included three former prosecutors from the international tribunals for Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, a forensic pathologist, an anthropologist who investigated mass graves in Kosovo and an expert in digital imaging provenance.
The experts reported that the 26,948 images, smuggled out of Syria by a man who says he was a crime-scene photographer for the military police, appeared to be evidence of the killing of as many as 11,000 prisoners, provided by “a truthful and credible witness.â€
The report does not reveal the name of the man who provided the photographs, identifying him by the pseudonym Caesar. That reminded some skeptics of Curveball, the code name assigned to the Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, whose bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs formed a central part of the case for the American invasion of Iraq. In 2011, just before the first street protests against President Assad’s Baathist dynasty, Mr. Janabi admitted to The Guardian that he had lied to German and American intelligence officials.
In an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN, the chairman of the panel, Sir Desmond de Silva, insisted that the experts, while “very conscious of the fact that there are competing interests in the Syrian crisis, both national and international,†had carried out an impartial inquiry. “Ultimately the validity of our conclusions turn on the integrity of the people involved,†he added.
Mr. de Silva, who was responsible for the arrest of Liberia’s former president, Charles Taylor, for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone, also told CNN, “This evidence could underpin a charge of crimes against humanity â€" without any shadow of a doubt.â€
A CNN interview with experts who reviewed graphic post-mortem photographs said to show the bodies of prisoners who died in the custody of Syrian security forces.
