The head of a U.S.-based Syrian advocacy organization on Monday said that a mass grave outside of Damascus contained the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the former government of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

Axar.az reports that citing Reuters, Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force said the site at al Qutayfah, 40 km north of the Syrian capital, was one of five mass graves that he had identified over the years.
"One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate" of the number of bodies buried at the site, said Moustafa, "It's a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate."

Moustafa said that he is sure there are more mass graves than the five sites, and that along with Syrians victims included U.S. and British citizens and other foreigners.

He said the intelligence branch of the Syrian air force was "in charge of bodies going from military hospitals, where bodies were collected after they'd been tortured to death, to different intelligence branches, and then they would be sent to a mass grave location."
Corpses also were transported to sites by the Damascus municipal funeral office whose personnel helped unload them from refrigerated tractor-trailers, he said.

Moustafa expressed concern that graves sites were unsecured and said they needed to be preserved to safeguard evidence for investigations.