I am Lieutenant Farid al-Madhan, the (former) head of the department for forensic evidence at the military police in Damascus, known as Caesar, says the middle-aged man in an interview with the TV company Al Jazeera.
When he fled Syria in 2013, he took with him around 55,000 images, taken after the civil war broke out two years earlier. Farid al-Madhan was then ordered to take pictures of those detained by dictator Bashar al-Assad's forces.
They were imprisoned, tortured, and killed in bloody and systematic ways. Their bodies were taken to military morgues to be photographed and then taken to mass graves, says al-Madhan, who claims to currently reside in France.
In order to gather the images, he continued to work with the government forces and delayed his escape from the war-torn country. He smuggled the files out of work on USB drives, which he hid in socks or bread packets.
Experts have since verified the content. They show emaciated bodies, people who had their eyes gouged out – one photograph shows hundreds of corpses in a shed.
The Assad regime, which fell in December, has consistently called the images "political". But the "Caesar documents", as al-Madhan's files are referred to in legal contexts, have been used, among other things, in war crimes investigations in Europe and to impose American sanctions against Syria.
