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               UN: Syria 'Exterminating' Its Imprisoned Detainees

   by VOA News

   United Nations investigators accused Syria on Monday of carrying out a
   massive "extermination" of detainees from its civilian population,
   alleging that it amounts to "a crime against humanity."

   The U.N. investigation, based on interviews with more than 600
   survivors and witnesses of prison life in Syria, said the government of
   President Bashar al-Assad is holding tens of thousands of detainees at
   any one time and that thousands more have "disappeared" after their
   arrests or gone missing after being abducted by armed groups.

   The U.N. report accused Damascus of starving the detainees or leaving
   them to die with untreated wounds and disease. It said Assad's
   government has "engaged in the multiple commissions of crimes,
   amounting to a systematic and widespread attack against a civilian
   population."

   The report covered the period from March 2011 to November 2015 -- the
   first 4½ years of the ongoing Syrian civil war.

   Investigators

   The U.N. investigators said they believed that "high-ranking officers"
   and other government officials knew of the deaths and of bodies being
   buried in mass graves.

   The special inquiry into the Syrian treatment of its civilian
   population called for the U.N. Security Council to impose "targeted
   sanctions" against Syrian civilian and military officials complicit in
   the deaths and torture, but did not name them.

   The investigators called for referral of the cases against the
   suspected war criminals to prosecutors at the International Criminal
   Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. Their names are being kept in a
   U.N. safe in Geneva.
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   [1]http://www.voanews.com/content/un-syria-exterminating-its-imprisoned
   -detainees/3181545.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/un-syria-exterminating-its-imprisoned-detainees/3181545.html