Syria – harsh images: Thousands search in morgues for their loved ones

After the opening of state prisons by the rebels and the release of prisoners in Syria, a Calvary began for the thousands of relatives of those imprisoned who did not return home.

Whether they’ve heard from them all these years or not, parents, siblings, spouses and children, with pictures of their own people in their hands and on their mobile phones, are searching the morgues of hospitals for the bodies of their own people among the corpses.

If they are lucky, they will find the body and identify it. But many dead who were transferred from prisons to hospital morgues are not easy to identify.

On a painted wall outside the Mustahed Hospital in Damascus are pictures of dead men, with faces distorted from torture.

In fact, according to the BBC, some of the men had been dead for weeks in the regime’s “slaughterhouse” prisons, as the photos show faces in decomposition.

When they manage to identify their own man, the relatives with the photo enter the morgue to search for his body.

Morgues are just plain, dirty rooms, without refrigeration and the bodies lie in floorcovered with plastic covers, which write a number on it.

The AP images are real, unforgiving and VERY HARD, showing the magnitude of the tragic moments lived by the relatives of the thousands of victims…

One of the dead was wearing a diaper. Another had duct tape across his chest, engraved with a number. All the bodies of the dead were emaciated. Doctors who examined them said they had signs of beatings, including severe bruising and multiple fractures.

According to a BBC report citing figures from the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, nearly 60,000 people were tortured and murdered in Assad’s prisons.