A team of internationally renowned war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts has found “direct evidence” of “systematic torture and killing” by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the lawyers on the team say in a new report.
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.
CNN’s “Amanpour” was given the report in a joint exclusive with The Guardian newspaper.
“This is a smoking gun,” said David Crane, 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.”
Crane, the first chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, indicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Taylor went on to become the first former head of state convicted of war crimes since World War II. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the photographs, documents and testimony referenced in the report, and is relying on the conclusions of the team behind it, which includes international criminal prosecutors, a forensic pathologist, an anthropologist and an expert in digital imaging.
The bodies in the photos showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing, according to the report.
In a group of photos of 150 individuals examined in detail by the experts, 62% of the bodies showed emaciation — severely low body weight with a hollow appearance indicating starvation. The majority of all of the victims were men most likely aged 20-40.
A complex numbering system was also used to catalog the corpses, with only the relevant intelligence service knowing the identities of the corpses. It was an effort, the report says, to keep track of which security service was responsible for the death, and then later to provide false documentation that the person had died in a hospital.
One of the three lawyers who authored the report — Sir Desmond de Silva, the former chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone — likened the images to those of Holocaust survivors.
The emaciated bodies were the product of starvation as a method of torture, “reminiscent of the pictures of those [who] were found still alive in the Nazi death camps after World War II,” he said in a CNN interview.
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This man is referred to in the report as “Caesar’s contact,” whom the lawyers also interviewed for the report.
The contact was working with what the report calls “international human rights groups,” and saw “Caesar” as a reliable source of information from within the country.
Soon Caesar was sending his contact thousands of images. When Caesar became concerned for his safety, his contacts in the Syrian opposition to whom he had leaked the photos arranged for him and his family to be smuggled out of Syria.
The lawyers have remained mum on how that was done, but the report says the process took four months, and that Caesar left the country before his family.
“If he wished to exaggerate his evidence it would have been very easy for him to say that he had actually witnessed executions,” the report says. “In fact, he made it quite plain that he never witnessed a single execution.”
It is unclear where Caesar and his family are currently living; the lawyers say only that they carried out their investigation in the Middle East.
The next step
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.
Because of Russia’s support for the Assad regime, and because it has veto power on the council, such a referral seems unlikely, at least for the time being.
But if, one day, the court were to take up Syria’s case, this report would almost certainly be entered into evidence.
“All we can do is put the ammunition in the pistol,” said de Silva. “It is for others to aim it and pull the trigger.”
