Mass grave containing thousands of bodies discovered in Aleppo

Syrian police have found a mass grave containing thousands of bodies after a citizen informed authorities that he had witnessed the burial of hundreds of bodies in it, an officer in the Aleppo Police Command said yesterday.

Police, he added, are waiting for specialised committees to take command of the site and recover the bodies.

The Ministry of Interior in the Syrian caretaker government issued a statement saying: “A resident of Aleppo informed the police command of a mass grave containing hundreds of bodies.”

It added that the commander of the Aleppo Governorate Police, Brigadier General Ahmed Latouf, went to the site “to investigate the case, and the Civil Defence teams were notified to go to the location. An attempt will be made later to determine the identity of the bodies through DNA testing.”

Numerous mass graves have been uncovered since the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December. The city of Al-Qutayfah, 70 kilometres north of the capital Damascus, contains the largest mass grave discovered so far, with reports that tens of thousands of people were buried there.

After the fall of the regime there have been growing demands to reveal the fate of those forcibly disappeared in Syria, whose numbers are estimated at more than 100,000.

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