The Fort Worth Press - UN war crimes investigators say Syria 'rich in evidence'

"The country is rich in evidence, and we won't have huge difficulty in pursuing accountability, criminal justice," said Hanny Megally of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

The sudden ousting last month of Assad after decades of dictatorship has seen the commission suddenly gain access to Syria, after striving since the early days of the civil war in 2011 to probe from abroad the vast array of alleged abuses.

"It was amazing to be in Damascus after the whole life of the commission not having access to the country at all," Megally told the Geneva UN correspondents' association ACANU after a recent visit to Syria.

With families rushing to former prisons, detention centres and suspected mass graves to find any trace of disappeared relatives, many have expressed concern about safeguarding documents and other evidence.

Describing his visits to prisons in Damascus, Megally acknowledged that "a lot of the evidence seems to have been tampered with, and either it was on the ground and you could see people... had been walking all over it, or had been damaged or destroyed.

"And we've all seen the reports of people having taken away documents with them."

- Evidence destroyed -

The notorious Saydnaya prison complex -- the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances that epitomises the atrocities committed against Assad's opponents -- "is pretty much emptied of any documents", Magally added.

He also said there were clear signs "of deliberate destruction of evidence", presumably by the Assad authorities before they left.

During his visit, Megally said he had seen "one or two places (with) rooms that looked to me like they were used to deliberately burn documents".

But he voiced optimism that the Syrian state under Assad was "a system that probably kept duplicates if not triplicates of everything, (so) even if evidence was destroyed, that may exist somewhere else".

And even in places where documents had clearly been intentionally destroyed, other parts of the building were "intact" and filled with evidence, he said.

"It seemed that there's still quite a lot of evidence that's protected now, and we hope can be used in future accountability."

Megally also said the careless handling of documents seen at the beginning had swiftly been brought to a halt once the calls to protect and preserve evidence went out.

"It was impressive just how quickly it seems people have picked up the fact that even by going and looking and moving things around, you're potentially risking tampering with evidence that could be used in future accountability processes," he said.

His colleague Lynn Welchman also said Syria's new authorities appeared to be "seeking to ensure the preservation of evidence for the future".

That is essential, she told reporters.

"One of the most important things for the future will be to ensure that what has happened in Syria never happens in Syria again," she said.

"There's a lot of work to be done in trying to find out what happened in order for all parts of Syrian society to move forward."

P.McDonald--TFWP