100,000 bodies in a single mass grave in northern Damascus, according to a Syrian NGO
The director of the Syrian Emergency Team, a Syrian NGO based in the United States, Mouaz Moustafa, has assured that a mass grave on the outskirts of Damascus contains the bodies of at least 100,000 people murdered by the government of the ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Moustafa assured in a telephone interview with the Reuters agency that in the town of Qutayfah, 40 kilometers north of the Syrian capital, there is a mass grave with at least 100,000 bodies. That number, he assures, “is the most conservative approximation.” “It is a very, almost unfairly, conservative estimate,” Moustafa insisted.
The director explained that the intelligence branch of the Syrian Air Force was responsible for collecting the bodies from military hospitals – where tortured people died – and transferring them to the facilities of different intelligence branches to later be buried in mass graves. .
Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, who preceded him as president until he died in 2000, are accused by the Syrian population, humanitarian and human rights organizations and the governments of other countries of hundreds of thousands of extrajudicial killings, including mass executions. inside the regime’s prisons.
The organization Human Rights Watch, for its part, has urged the new Syrian authorities to take urgent measures to secure and preserve physical evidence in the country of international crimes committed by Assad.
This NGO has visited a mass grave in the Tadamon neighborhood, in the south of Damascus, where it has found dozens of human remains, including teeth and skull bones, jaws, hands and pelvis. He assured that “the Syrian transitional authorities must take urgent measures to secure and preserve physical evidence throughout the country of serious international crimes committed by members of the previous Government.” (Agencies)
