We heard about the massacre when Ruth Sherlock, the correspondent I was working with, received a call from her news desk that the story had broken on the wires. We raced to the site and found a scene of total pandemonium: dozens of bodies were laid out in rows in a schoolyard in the rebel-held district of Bustan al-Qasr. Each was covered by a tarp but their faces had been left exposed so that they could be identified. Hundreds of people flooded the scene — many had missing relatives and had come to see if they were among the dead.
The atmosphere was one of palpable incredulity. Despite the risk of being shelled or bombed from the air, civilians wandered around the site, searching for an explanation of what had happened or how such an act of violence could have taken place. We exchanged confused looks with Syrians at the scene.
All of the victims were male, mostly between the ages of 20 and 40, but there was also 14-year-old boy and an elderly man. All of them had been shot in the head at close range and their hands and feet had been roughly bound with wire, string or tape.
Within a few hours it became clear that most of the victims had been residents in rebel-controlled districts of Aleppo. They were quickly recognized by the locals who flocked to the scene and took their bodies away.
The one common thread in accounts we gathered was that many of the victims had gone missing when they were in government-controlled areas.
On Wednesday afternoon, they were still pulling corpses out of the river. By evening, the total number of dead stood around 100.
