US government was earlier aware of new evidences of mass torture and killings of detainees by Syrian regime

Extracted from AFP report- Jan 24, 2014
WASHINGTON- US government officials saw as early as November hundreds of images of alleged mass torture and killings of detainees held by the Syrian regime, the State Department said Thursday.
But President Barack Obama’s administration at the time decided against making public a report alleging the large-scale torture and murder of 11,000 detainees by Damascus, out of concern for the safety of the source and in order to identify the documents, deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said.
The report, finally released Monday, was put together by a British law firm and commissioned by Qatar, which backs the Syrian rebels.
Based on forensic analysis of part of 55,000 digital images smuggled out of Syria by a defector who said he served as a police photographer, it points to “clear evidence” of the starvation, strangulation and beating of detainees in Syrian prisons.
“We learned of the existence of this database of photos in November. We were shown some of the sample images of them, we the United States government,” Harf told reporters.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said they “raised questions that require an answer.”
Marie Harf said that beyond the latest report, Washington had a “huge amount of evidence that the Assad regime has brutalized its people, including in prisons… that he has committed war crimes.”