UN investigative body hopes to send team to Syria to secure evidence

The head of a U.N. investigative body has written to Syria's new authorities to express a willingness to engage with them and to travel to Syria to secure evidence that could implicate top officials of the former government, he said on Tuesday.

Rebels swept President Bashar al-Assad from power this month, flinging open prisons and government offices and raising fresh hopes for accountability for crimes committed during Syria's more than 13-year civil war.

"Our first priority would be to go and try and scope the extent of the issue, see exactly what is available in terms of access and potential evidence, and then see how we could best assist in preserving that," Robert Petit, head of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), told a Geneva press briefing.

"There is now the possibility of accessing evidence of the highest level of (the) regime," he added.

The U.N. body was set up in 2016 to probe and help prosecute the most serious crimes committed in Syria since 2011. It has already collected 283 terabytes of data and is cooperating with national prosecutors, including teams in Belgium, France and the United States on Syria investigations.

Petit said that there had been some evidence lost in Syria in the transition but that it was too early to know the scale.

"We have noted with hope a state of awareness from the transitional authorities and from civil Syrian civil society actors of the need to preserve evidence," he added.