Patients tortured in Syrian hospital

Secretly filmed footage shown by a British TV station shows what the report said was evidence of patients being tortured in a military hospital in the battered Syrian city of Homs. Images broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday show bandaged patients chained to hospital beds by their ankles, while a whip and electrical cable lie nearby. The chest of one man, with bandaged eyes, is striped by horizontal red marks that appear to have been caused by whipping, according to a forensic expert interviewed by Channel 4. The channel said the film was shot in the past three months by a medical worker in a military hospital in Homs and smuggled out of Syria by a French journalist, but said they were unable to independently verify the images. "I've seen detainees being tortured by electrocution, whipping, beating with batons and by breaking their legs," the hospital worker says in the video, the comments translated into English. "They operate without anaesthetics. I saw them slamming detainees' heads against walls. They shackle the patients to the beds. They deny them water." Homs had been pounded by Syrian forces for nearly four weeks until Thursday, when rebel troops withdrew from the central Syrian city's Baba Amr district in the face of overwhelmingly superior firepower. The Red Cross were on Tuesday negotiating for a fourth day to be allowed to deliver aid to Baba Amr and evacuate the wounded. New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch said on Saturday that Syrian forces had killed some 700 people and wounded thousands in the 27-day bombardment, with shells sometimes falling at the rate of 100 an hour.