The inquiry team was mandated to determine the credibility of a defector from Syria whose occupation prior to his defection was in the service of the military police of the Syrian government. In that capacity, for many years, he had been in the military police and in that role it fell to him to photograph scenes of crimes. With the onset of the civil war the nature of his occupation changed. His duties, and those of his colleagues, now were to photograph and document the bodies of those brought from their places of detention to a military hospital.
The bodies he photographed since the civil war began, showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing.
The defector who was code-named “Caesar” by the inquiry team had, during the course of his work, smuggled out some tens of thousands of images of corpses so photographed by his colleagues and himself. Other similar images have been smuggled out by other people. In all, approximately fifty-five thousand (55,000) images have, to date, been made available outside Syria by these processes. As there were some four or five photographs taken of each body this approximates to there being images of about eleven thousand (11,000) dead detainees.
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