UN Security Council sees ghastly photographs of tortured, strangled war victims

The UN Security Council fell silent Tuesday after ambassadors viewed a series of ghastly photographs of dead Syrian civil war victims, France’s ambassador said.

The pictures showed people who were emaciated, with their bones protruding.

Some bore the marks of strangulation and repeated beatings, some had their eyes gouged out.

French Ambassador Gerard Araud said the pall of silence lingered, and then questions slowly began about the credibility of the slides of the dead, who offer mute testimony to the savagery of a Syrian civil war in which more than 150,000 have died. The council members were shown more than the 10 photos publicly released in January as part of a forensic investigation funded by the government of Qatar — a major backer of the opposition and one of the nations most deeply involved in the Syrian conflict. France, which hosted the presentation at the Security Council, as well as a showing of the images afterward at a news conference, said they are evidence of war crimes by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government. The veracity of the photos could not be independently confirmed.

Syria’s Justice Ministry has dismiss- ed the photos and an accompanying report as “politicized and lacking objectiveness and professionalism,” a “gathering of images of unidentified people, some of whom have turned out to be foreigners.” The ministry said some of the people were militants killed in battle and others were killed by militant groups. Among the new photos was an image of at least a dozen bodies laid out on the floor of a warehouse, being wrapped in plastic sheets while men in military garb stand among them. One of the authors of the report, former Sierra Leone Special Court prosecutor David M. Crane, said it was firm evidence of “industrialized systematic killing.”