Overview
- The international project led by NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung with ICIJ partners has published the Damascus Dossier, a regime archive of about 134,000 documents and more than 70,000 images spanning 1994 to December 2024.
- Within the trove are 10,212 photographed corpses, mostly documented from mid‑2015 to October 2024, with a reporter‑audited sample showing widespread undernourishment and injuries consistent with systematic torture.
- German Federal Prosecutor Jens Rommel confirmed receipt of the dataset and said criminal police and a forensic pathologist are evaluating the evidentiary value as part of ongoing structure investigations under universal jurisdiction.
- Military hospitals, especially Harasta in Damascus, served as hubs for photographing bodies and issuing death certificates that frequently listed ‘heart failure,’ a practice described by witnesses and one Harasta doctor as concealment.
- Reporters extracted more than 1,500 names for family tracing and shared them with Syrian NGOs and the UN’s IIMP, while identifying former Harasta physicians now practicing in Germany, with no individual criminal responsibility established to date.