Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  The work of Professor Wolfram Meier-Augenstein and his team on the role of stable isotope analysis in human identification, and its forensic application, has been groundbreaking. It was his expertise in a case of the death of one young boy that helped to convict the child’s father.

  Paramedics had been called to an address where a pitifully thin little boy was reported to be unresponsive. Noticing some bloodstains on the banister of the staircase and a spherical indentation in the plasterwork, they informed the police. The child died in hospital and the postmortem report identified multiple injuries to his brain and internal organs. There was also a list of old injuries. The father denied ever having hit his son or being involved in any way in his death. He was, he claimed, a loving parent.

  Tissue samples were sent for analysis, including some pieces of bone, a big toenail, a thumbnail and some muscle. The big toenail provided a chronological profile of the child’s nutrition over the previous year.

  Professor Meier-Augenstein was able to identify three periods of dietary life history and two changes in dietary lifestyle. The period most distant from death, four to twelve months before, was nutritionally stable, and the little boy was consuming a normal omnivorous diet. Four months before he died, there was a shift towards a different diet, based on plants in the C3 category (such as wheat, rye, oats and rice) rather than C4 plants (maize, sugarcane and millet). One explanation for a change like this would be a move from a warm and arid climate to a more temperate one. In the last two months of his life, there had been a pronounced departure from an omnivorous diet to one containing virtually no animal protein.

  The police had learned through their inquiries that until about four months before his death, the boy had been living in Pakistan with his mother, without any physical contact with his father. The child had then come to the UK, where he was in the parental custody of his father, although initially he had lived for the most part with his grandparents. But for the final two months of his life, his father had been his sole carer. The grandparents had been told that his bruises and injuries had been accidental and had no suspicion of what was happening to their grandson. Eventually, the boy’s father admitted manslaughter and he was given a nineteen-year prison sentence.

  Our bodies do not lie, but sometimes it takes an expert to coax the truth from them. Even from our toenails.

  Feet may hold other information about our lifestyle. For example, tiny pinpricks can alert the forensic anthropologist to intravenous drug use. The foot is not, of course, normally the preferred site for injecting drugs—that is usually the upper limb—but within about four years of intensive drug abuse, the veins may start to collapse and become inaccessible, and the habitual user will often move on to the leg and foot. Because there is so little soft tissue covering the back of the foot, the veins here are often very visible and therefore easy to locate. Evidence of the habit can also be conveniently hidden away under socks and shoes.

  Many IV drug-users choose the vein between the first and second toes, but injecting here carries an increased risk of complications such as slow healing, abscess, infection, vein collapse, thrombosis and leg ulceration. The veins in the foot are thin and prone to bursting under injection pressure. Heroin addicts often use tattoos to hide injection sites and track marks and so when we see tattooing on the feet, especially between the big and second toe, it signals to us that the foot will merit closer inspection.

  Because of the volume of nerve endings in the feet (just think how ticklish they are), pain we experience here can be acute and debilitating. And that makes them a target for anyone wishing to inflict it. Falanga, or foot whipping, an ancient practice now recognized as a form of torture by the European Court of Human Rights, has been documented in various parts of the world, mainly among Middle and Far Eastern nations. It can result in walking impairments and sometimes in fractures to the bones of the feet.

  In January 2014 I was contacted out of the blue by an international legal firm based in London. They were putting together an independent investigatory team that included international litigators and forensic practitioners. Would I be prepared to fly out to Qatar and examine some images? I would be away for no more than a week and all my costs and expenses would be covered. An air ticket would be left for me to pick up at Heathrow airport on the appointed date. I was not told what these images contained or who else would be in the team.

  Being a cautious sort, I checked out the firm. They seemed perfectly legit and the gentleman who had contacted me was clearly a highly regarded international lawyer. I also checked with my Foreign & Commonwealth Office contacts, who assured me that they saw nothing that concerned them in their approach.

  But this was as much as I knew. Other than that, I was on my own, and could potentially be putting myself out on a limb. Hearing nothing further from the law firm, I decided to leave it to fate. As I was in London anyway, I would go to Heathrow, and if there were no tickets at the desk, so be it. If the tickets were there . . . well, perhaps it was time for a new adventure.

  My tickets were waiting for me—and they were first class. I wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or worried. But I must admit that it is lovely to be able to turn left as you get on to a plane, and while I have occasionally been granted the luxury of travelling business class, I was about to discover that first class is on a different level altogether.

  Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a particularly debilitating, month-long bout of labyrinthitis, an inner-ear infection, and I was anxious about flying. Moreover, I was not touching alcohol, in case it interfered with my medication, and being very careful about what I ate, for fear that the overwhelming motion sickness associated with the condition might return. So I sat there in my spacious first-class seat, for what was the first and, I suspect, will be the only time in my life (I am essentially a budget girl), rejecting all offers of champagne, fine wine, scallops, steak and chocolate and accepting only bread and water. But it was a wonderful experience all the same. The beds were very comfortable, the attendants most attentive and the free gifts all by Dior. Still, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was an imposter who might be caught out at any moment.

  When we landed at Hamad International airport in Doha, all first-class passengers were asked to remain on board. It appeared that there was a limousine assigned to each of us to take us to the terminal. I could get used to this kind of travel, I thought to myself. Then my name was called and I was requested to stay until last. I knew it—found out at the last minute, and now I would have to face the solitary walk of shame to the terminal.

  But no, it turned out that I had a special limousine with a senior politician to escort me through the airport and to my hotel. He took my passport, spoke to immigration, had it stamped and collected my luggage for me while I just relaxed in the car. Yet there was a prickle of disquiet at the back of my neck. When a government goes to these extremes, there may be a price to be paid, so you must remain vigilant. There is, as they say, no such thing as a free lunch, and this standard of treatment was highly unusual, to say the least. I was driven to an incredible hotel and shown to my own private suite. An entire floor had been given over to our team so that we could work there in seclusion. It was very clear now that whatever we were here to do carried the Qatari government’s full backing. There were six of us. Three of our number were among the world’s most eminent international criminal lawyers. Also in attendance was the lawyer who had approached me to begin with, who turned out to be the most charming of gentlemen. I was also very reassured to encounter a pathologist from the UK who was a friend of mine. And then there was me. We were briefed by a government official.

  The Arab Spring protests of 2011 had led to significant unrest in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. A number of the demonstrations there had been violently suppressed and many men had gone missing or been detained. The Financial Times had reported that Qatar had funded the Syrian rebellion by “as much as $3 billion” over the first two
years of the ensuing civil war, and that the country was offering refugee packages of about $50,000 a year to defectors and their families. One such defector was a man only ever known to us by his code name, “Caesar.”

  Caesar told war crimes investigators that before the Arab Spring he had been a forensic investigator. Once the Syrian uprising began, he had been employed as a photographer in the Syrian military police. His job was “taking pictures of dead detainees” at two military hospitals in Damascus, documenting the corpses of those who had died in Syrian military prisons. He did not claim ever to have witnessed executions or torture, but he did describe a highly organized system for recording deaths.

  He alleged that every body brought to the hospital was marked with two numbers: one purported to relate to their hospital admission and the other was their detention camp number. He had to photograph each face alongside its hospital number, an image that could be sent to the man’s family, with a message regretfully informing them that their son/husband/father had died in hospital of natural causes and that the photo was the proof required for a death certificate to be issued.

  He never saw evidence of torture on these faces. All the evidence of torture was below the level of the jaw. These injuries also had to be photographed—this time with the detention number, as proof that the orders given for the prisoner to be tortured had been carried out.

  Caesar became increasingly affected by the scale of the operation unfolding in front of him and, seeing a way out in the tantalizing refugee package being offered by Qatar, he began to talk to a rebel group. He was persuaded, at great personal risk, to copy the photographic evidence. Every day he brought out a USB stick, concealed in the toe of his sock, and passed it to the group.

  They managed to smuggle these USB sticks out of the country and, in August 2013, Caesar “died” in a tragic road accident. In reality, while his grieving family attended his funeral, he, too, was being secretly transported out of Syria. By the time we met Caesar in Doha in January 2014, his family had also been successfully removed to safety and reunited with him.

  He had copied over 55,000 images of what were claimed to be more than 11,000 bodies, all showing evidence of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation and other forms of torture and killing. The task of the lawyers on our team was to interview Caesar to determine whether he was a credible witness, while the forensic pathologist and I were required to examine as many of the 55,000 images as we could to establish whether they were fabricated, whether any of them were duplicates or whether they were the real thing.

  The inquiry team approached the job of evidence evaluation with caution. We were all alert to the need to guard against being used as a vehicle for the advancement of any particular political point of view. It was vital that the team came to its own conclusions, that we were operating without interference from other parties and that our findings were unbiased and justifiable.

  The pathologist and I left the hotel in a car which took a very circuitous route to an apartment block in downtown Doha. We would visit that apartment on three separate occasions, but we never went the same way twice. We were aware that we were being followed by Qatari special forces to ensure that the secrecy of Caesar’s location was maintained.

  We sat in the car until given the all-clear to enter the building. At the door of the flat we were met by security, who checked that we were “clean” before we were taken into a very sparsely furnished sitting room and left there alone for quite some time. Finally, Caesar entered the room and we were introduced. He was a quiet and likeable man. A laptop was brought in. We were allowed to open it and the folders it held, which contained thousands of images, all of deceased males. We spent the first hour simply flicking through these, to become accustomed to what we were seeing and also to look for signs of any evidence of duplication or staging.

  Caesar was, not surprisingly, very wary of us at first, but as we spent time with him, and he was reassured that there was no suspicious agenda to our questions, he relaxed. We asked if he had taken all the images himself. He said that he had not. We asked if he had witnessed any of the killings and he confirmed that he had not. It appeared from his responses that he was not trying to exaggerate any of his claims.

  In one picture there was a clear image of the photographer’s thumb. Although I knew it was not Caesar’s thumb, because I had done an assessment of his hand anatomy while sitting next to him, I asked him if it was. He said that it was not. No matter how many times we posed our questions from different angles, his answers were always consistent and unambiguous, and if he didn’t know the answer, he was content just to say so.

  We talked about the report we would be writing, although at that time I was not aware of its ultimate purpose. The men surrounding Caesar were insistent that we could not use any of the photographs in the report but I urged them to rethink, reasoning that the visual effect of what we were seeing was particularly important. I showed them how we could anonymize any images we were permitted to reproduce by blacking out faces and numbers in such a way that these changes could not be reversed. After much discussion and debate, they eventually agreed to us using a few of the images—no more than ten—as long as their subjects were completely unidentifiable. This was a significant victory, as it transformed the impact and the value of the report.

  It was clear that we were not going to have sufficient time to examine all the photographs in the files, so what we decided to do was to “dip-sample” into every folder to gather a broad representation of the nature of the injuries that we were seeing. In total we worked through nearly 5,500 of the photographs and sorted them into categories.

  Like Caesar, we saw no evidence of torture in the bodies above the level of the jaw. But sixteen per cent of our sample showed transverse ligature marks around the neck. These were inconsistent with hanging, in which the imprint left by suspension generally turns upwards towards the back. It was our opinion that these were strangulation marks, and consistent with torture. In one picture the ligature used, a fan belt from a car, was still around the individual’s neck. Some ligature marks were present on wrists and ankles and, in one case, a plastic cable tie was visible.

  Five per cent contained what are known as tramline bruises: where a person is struck with a long, cylindrical object such as an iron bar, or even a plastic rod, which bursts the surface of the skin, causing linear open bruising. These very distinct sets of parallel marks were seen not only across the torsos of some individuals, but in other cases on the limbs as well. One body in particular showed so many such bruises—over fifty—up and down the torso, that the victim must have been bound at the time, otherwise he would have been trying to curl up to protect himself.

  There was a high level of emaciation in over 60 per cent of our sample. Many of the bodies were so thin it was as if we were looking at photographs from the concentration camps of the Second World War. Bones protruded through skin, every rib was visible and faces were hollow and sunken.

  The last category of specific trauma we analysed related to the lower limbs, and specifically to the shins and feet. Over 55 per cent depicted extensive ulceration to this area of the body. The precise cause was unclear and Caesar was unable to enlighten us as he only ever saw the aftermath of the torture. Potential explanations include pressure effects (pressure sores), vascular insufficiency, inflicted injury, such as application of hot or cold objects, and tissue breakdown resulting from poor nutrition. But with the majority of the ulcerating lesions in this sample occurring in young men, a natural cause for all of them was highly unlikely.

  The most probable explanation was venous insufficiency as a result of a cripplingly painful torture involving a ligature bound tightly around the knees that severely restricts the movement of blood in the lower limbs. The build-up of pressure sees vessels rupture and skin ulcerate. More than half of the men we sampled had this in both their legs and feet, and it was evidence of a regime and pattern of torture.

  The photographs were not always taken
from the best of angles, from the perspective of a forensic scientist trying to accurately diagnose some of these torture injuries, and the punishment of falanga could not be excluded. Falanga beatings, which have been reported in Syria, tend to focus on the soft, middle-arch region of the foot, rather than the heel or the ball, and require either co-operation between torturers or for the victim to be immobilized—forms of restraint that some images suggested were being used while inflicting other injuries.

  We found Caesar to be a credible and compelling witness and the images to be genuine. Our report, the Da Silva report, was completed in Qatar. By the following week its publication would be covered by newspapers and broadcasters all over the world, many of them, including the Guardian in the UK, reproducing it in full. It was timed to coincide with the Geneva II Conference on Syria, a United Nations–backed international peace conference aimed at ending the Syrian civil war. The launch of the report, on the eve of the peace talks, put Assad’s regime on the back foot and sparked international outrage and condemnation of the industrial scale of the slaughter. But as yet, this has led to no obvious resolution.

  It feels appropriate to leave the last word to Caesar. He told US President Obama: “I have risked my life, and the life of my immediate family, and even exposed my relatives to extreme danger, in order to stop the systematic torture that is practised by the regime against prisoners.”