AKIPRESS.COM - The United Nations Security Council will meet privately to view projected slides of the dead, who offer mute testimony to the savagery of a Syrian civil war in which more than 150,000 have died, 680Newsreported.

France, which is hosting the closed-door meeting, says the photos to be displayed are part of a collection of 55,000 digital images of Syrians who were tortured and slain by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. France says a majority of them were collected by a Syrian military police photographer code-named “Caesar”, who smuggled them out on flash drives when he defected.

Syria’s Justice Ministry has dismissed the photos and accompanying report as “politicized and lacking objectiveness and professionalism,” a “gathering of images of unidentified people, some of whom have turned out to be foreigners.” The ministry said some of the people were militants killed in battle and others were killed by militant groups.

The presentation at the Security Council is part of a process of documenting evidence of Syrian war crimes in the hope of eventually referring the perpetrators to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The meeting “will also allow a discussion on the means to ensure accountability for these crimes.”

In the collection of 55,000 images, each body was photographed four or five times, so the authors estimate that about 11,000 victims are pictured.

The forensic team examined about 5,500 of the images and found that almost all were of men aged 20 to 40; only one woman was pictured, and she was clothed; and there were no children in the images.