Syria 'torture' photos shown to UN

15 April 2014 Last updated at 23:48 The photos are among 55,000 digital images apparently provided by a former Syrian police photographer Graphic photographs of prisoners allegedly tortured by Syrian government forces have been shown to members of the UN Security Council.

The images, reportedly smuggled out by a defector, appear to show evidence of abuse, including beatings, strangulation and long-term starvation.

The photos were first released in January in a report commissioned by Qatar, which backs Syria's opposition.

The Syrian government has dismissed the report, saying it has no credibility.

The meeting was called by France, which wants the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes against humanity.

President Bashar al-Assad's main ally, Russia, has the power to veto that.

'Gruesome'

Security Council members fell silent as the images were shown on Tuesday, said France's UN ambassador, Gerard Araud.

Investigators have examined thousands of images of dead prisoners

"The gruesome images of corpses bearing marks of starvation, strangulation and beatings... indicate that the Assad regime has carried out systematic, widespread and industrial killing," said Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN.

"Nobody who sees these images will ever be the same."

'Credible'

The report, by three former war crimes prosecutors, is based on the evidence of a defected military police photographer, referred to only as Caesar

He, along with others, reportedly smuggled about 55,000 digital images of some 11,000 dead detainees out of Syria.

Continue reading the main story Source of roughly half of the 55,000 imagesMilitary police photographer who worked for the government for 13 years Since uprising of March 2011, his job was to photograph bodies of detainees believed to have died under torture "Significant number" of bodies show signs of starvation, other injuries include burns, bruising, gouged eyes, ligature marks indicating strangulation, and signs of electrocutionSent images to relative by marriage outside Syria"Caesar" and family smuggled out after he feared for his safety and amid psychological strain of workHe said his job had been to take photographs of corpses, both to allow a death certificate to be produced and to confirm that execution orders had been carried out.

He did not claim to have witnessed killings or torture himself.

The photographs in the report cover the period from the start of the uprising in March 2011 until August last year.

All but one of the bodies shown are male. Some had no eyes, and some showed signs of electrocution.

Syria's Justice Ministry dismissed the photos and accompanying report as "lacking objectiveness and professionalism", according to the Associated Press.

But one of the authors of the report, former Sierra Leone Special Court prosecutor David Crane, said the photographs - and the witness himself - were "credible and sustainable in a court of law".

While Caesar's photos would appear to offer evidence of war crimes by the Syrian government, both Mr Araud and Mr Crane said that crimes had also been committed by opposition forces.

More than 150,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, with millions forced to flee their homes.

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A regime of torture and secret prisons

The government of "liberated" Iraq operates secret prisons and routinely tortures prisoners to extract confessions that are used to convict them, Amnesty charged today.

The London-based rights watchdog released a report - Broken Bodies, Broken Minds - which estimates that 30,000 men and women remain in custody in post-Saddam Iraq, including about 1,300 on death row.

Amnesty said that some were languishing in secret facilities operated by the ministries of defence and the interior, which are believed to have close links to sectarian Islamist groups.

"Iraqi security forces use torture and other ill treatment to extract 'confessions' when detainees are held incommunicado, especially in detention facilities - some secret - controlled by the ministries of interior and defence," the report alleges.

Amnesty said that Iraq's Central Criminal Court often convicts defendants on the basis of "confessions" clearly obtained under torture.

Accounts of torture collected over the years include "rape and the threat of rape, beatings with cables and hosepipes, electric shocks, suspension by the limbs, piercing the body with drills, asphyxiation with plastic bags, removal of toenails with pliers, and breaking of limbs."

Amnesty noted that Iraq's Human Rights Ministry had recorded 509 allegations of torture by the country's security forces in a 2009 report but said that the figure was a "gross underestimate of the scale of the abuse."

And it warned that US forces had handed over tens of thousands of prisoners to Iraqi custody between early 2009 and July 2010 without any guarantees that they would be protected.

In 2008 Iraq's parliament voted to join most of the rest of the world in banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners by signing up to the UN Convention Against Torture.

But Iraq has still not filed its paperwork with the UN and "there is no indication that the government intends to," according to the report.

Iraqi MP Mahmoud Othman of the Kurdistan Socialist Party insisted that parliament intends to ratify the UN treaty but has been too busy trying to stabilise the occupied country to address it yet.

"The convention enjoys the support of all political blocks and nobody rejected it in the previous parliament," Mr Othman said.

foreigneditor@peoples-press.com

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