Al Jazeera gains access to hospital where bodies of torture victims were taken to
Al Jazeera’s Omar al-Hajj has gained entry to the Harasta Military Hospital in the Damascus countryside, which employees and witnesses said was used as an assembling point for bodies of people who either died under torture or were executed.
“The scene here is horrific. The smell is unbearable,” al-Hajj said, reporting from the hospital’s mortuary. “Some bodies show clear signs of recent torture. I can see some fresh bloodstains and names written on the white body covers,” he said.
Al Jazeera’s al-Hajj said investigations are under way to find out whether the bodies of victims at the facility were brought there from the notorious Sednaya prison.
Our correspondent, who gained exclusive access to the hospital, said it was a former hospital employee who had informed opposition forces that Harasta was being used as an assembly point for victims of torture.
The employee “used to drive a water tank and was assigned by the hospital to follow the truck that was used to bring the bodies from the Sednaya prison,” al-Hajj reported.
“The former employee says every now and then, bodies were brought when they reached a certain limit at the prison, perhaps one or two hundred. The water tank followed the truck carrying bodies and was used to clear any odour or fluids coming out from the dead,” he said.
A medical team at the hospital told al-Hajj that some of the bodies at the hospital were of people who had died only in the past few days, before the opposition fighters reached Damascus.
“They say they’re trying to contact specialist teams to help identify the dead and understand how they died,” he added.
UN investigator says access to Syria a ‘game-changer’ in documenting al-Assad crimes
Robert Petit, a Canadian prosecutor and legal scholar who heads the UN investigative body known as the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) on Syria, said obtaining access to the “crime scene” after the downfall of al-Assad would enable the collection of “massive evidence”.
“The evidence in Syria is finally becoming available,” he told AFP. “If we can have access to the crime scene, it’s a game-changer for us.” Petit’s 82-member team has gathered large amounts of evidence of the worst international crimes committed during the war.
“It’s already quite clear that there’s massive evidence,” he said, pointing to the videos emerging from Syria’s emptying prisons showing “rooms full of reams and reams of paper”.
The most important thing now was to “preserve the evidence”, Petit told the news agency. The IIIM has set up a “basic how-to” on its website, including the importance of ensuring there is a clear chain of custody for every interaction with it, he said.
People look through documents as they search for prisoners underground at Sednaya prison
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