Marco Di Lauro, an Italian photographer who took a shocking photo from Iraq in 2003 showing the corpses of Shiite Iraqi children killed during the Saddam era announced that he was shocked to see the photo on BBC website atop a report from the recent massacre in Syria.”Somebody is using illegally one of my images for anti Syrian propaganda on the BBC website front page,” Di Lauro said.
“Today Sunday May 27 at 0700 am London time the attached image which I took in Al Mussayyib in Iraq on March 27, 2003 was front page on BBC website illustrating the massacre that happen in Houla the Syrian town and the caption and the web site was stating that the image was showing the bodies of all the people that have been killed in the massacre and that the image was received by the BBC by an unknown activist. Somebody is using my images as a propaganda against the Syrian government to prove the massacre,” he added.
The picture taken from Iraq shows an Iraqi child jumping over a line of hundreds of bodies, in a school where they have been transported from a mass grave, to be identified. They were discovered in the desert in the outskirts of Al Musayyib, 40 km south of Baghdad. It has been estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 Iraqis had been reported missing in the region south of Baghdad. People have been searching for days for identity cards or other clues among the skeletons to try to find the remains of brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters and even children who disappeared when Saddam’s government crushed a Shiite uprising following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Marco di Lauro had published the image on his website as part of his story “Iraq, the Aftermath of Saddam”.
