“Appalling signs of torture": in Syria, rebels claim to have found dozens of corpses in a Damascus hospital

“I opened the door of the morgue with my own hands, and it was a horrible sight: some forty bodies were piled up, showing signs of appalling torture,” Mohammed al-Hajj, a fighter from rebel factions in the south of the country, described to AFP by telephone from Damascus.
 

AFP was able to view dozens of photographs and video footage that Mr. Hajj said he had taken himself, showing corpses with obvious signs of torture: eyes and teeth pulled out, blood splattered and bruised. Images taken at Harasta hospital also showed a piece of tissue containing bones, while the rib cage of a decomposing body appeared through the skin.
 

The bodies were placed in white plastic bags or wrapped in white cloth, some stained with blood, on which numbers and sometimes names were inscribed. Several of them appear to have been killed recently. Rebels led by the radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized power on Sunday, ousting former president Bashar al-Assad, whose family ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than five decades.
 

At the heart of the system of government Mr. Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a complex of prisons and detention centers used to eliminate dissent by imprisoning those suspected of deviating from the ruling Baath party line. Thousands of people hoping to find relatives missing in Bashar al-Assad's jails had gathered on Monday evening in the notorious Saydnaya prison, near Damascus, AFP correspondents observed.
 

Mohammed al-Hajj said that rebel fighters had been informed by a hospital employee of the presence of corpses there. “We informed the military command of what we found and coordinated our action with that of the Syrian Red Crescent, which transported the bodies to a Damascus hospital, so that the families could come and identify them,” he added.
 

Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons from Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), told AFP that the bodies were probably those of Saydnaya prison inmates.