Syrians calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down plan to march on Friday in memory of children who have been killed during the uprising, The Associated Press reports.
As my colleague Liam Stack explained earlier this week, images of the battered body of one young protester — a 13-year-old boy named Hamza Ali al-Khateeb whose remains were returned to his family last week — have sparked particular outrage since they began to circulate online.
The images come from a very graphic postmortem video, apparently filmed by the boy’s family before his funeral, which appeared to show that he was tortured and mutilated as well as shot and killed. (The video is so disturbing that it was briefly removed from YouTube last weekend, but it has now been reinstated.)
Video posted online by Syrian activists, said to to show last week’s funeral for a 13-year-old protester in Jiza, a southern Syrian village.A commemorative Facebook page, called “We Are All the Child Martyr Hamza Ali al-Khateeb” — which echoes the “We Are All Khaled Said” page set up in honor of an Egyptian whose death at the hands of the police helped spark the revolution there — urged protesters to take to the streets on Friday for “The Day of Hamza.”
In an apparent attempt to tamp down the anger raised by the video of the young boy, whose death has been compared to that of the Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan, Syrian state television produced a report this week which, it said, “unveiled the truth about the story of martyr Hamza al-Khateeb.”
According to a young man featured in the television report, who claimed to have witnessed the boy’s shooting, he was not killed during a peaceful protest by the security forces but during a gun battle initiated by armed demonstrators who opened fire on Syrian soldiers.
Syria’s official news agency, SANA, added that a “professor of media psychology at Damascus University, Majdi Fares, said the incident of al-Khateeb’s death was used by some satellite channels and media in a biased way for misleading purposes through lies and fabrications.”
After Syrian activists reported that the boy’s father had been detained by the authorities following the release of the video of his son’s body, Syrian television broadcast a prerecorded interview with him on Tuesday, in which he praised Syria’s president.