• Report: Syrian military hospitals torturing patients

    By msnbc.com and news services

    Updated at 10:50 a.m. ET: Syrian doctors tortured patients brought into a military hospital in the battered city of Homs, according to a hospital employee who filmed the apparent evidence. The video was broadcast by Britain's Channel 4 News Monday.

    Later on Tuesday, the United Nations said it had similar footage.

    The very graphic video, which the news channel said was filmed covertly, showed severely wounded men blindfolded and chained to hospital beds. A rubber whip and an electrical cable sit on a table in one room.

    "I have seen detainees being tortured by electrocution, whipping, beating with batons, and by breaking their legs," the employee told a French photojournalist who reportedly smuggled the video outside of Syria, according to Channel 4.

    The authenticity of the film could not be independently verified. 

    McCain calls for US-led airstrikes on Assad forces

    The hospital employee said he tried to stop "the shameful things" that were happening but was called a traitor. 

    He said the torture was carried out by civilian and military surgeons and other medical staff including nurses. It reportedly took place in the ambulance section, the prison ward, the X-ray department and the intensive care unit. The footage was filmed over the past three months, Channel 4 said.

    U.S. and European governments have been pleading for Russia to rethink his anti-interventionist stance on Syria, in what appeared to be an increasingly desperate effort for consensus among world powers to stop a crackdown that has killed more than 7,500 people.

    Saudi Arabia: Syrians right to fight Assad regime

    Hussein Malla / AP

    Hundreds of Syrians, like this child and her family, have fled besieged areas in and around Homs for Lebanon or the Lebanon-Syria border.

    Hundreds fled to neighboring Lebanon on Monday fearing they'd be massacred in their homes.

    Calls for action to protect civilians have grown louder as the Alawite-led security apparatus cracked down on protests and an uprising that has its roots in the majority Sunni community and which has raised the prospect of civil war in Syria.

    'Pictures are truly shocking'
    A U.N. commission of inquiry last November documented cases of injured people taken to military hospitals where they were beaten and tortured during interrogation.

    Video: Senor: US could be arming, training forces inside Syria

    "The High Commissioner was sent this footage by Channel 4 yesterday. In fact we have some similar footage," U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said on Tuesday.

    "It may even be the same footage which was sent to the commission of inquiry on Syria," Colville, a spokesman for U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, said at a news briefing. "The pictures are truly shocking."

    A U.N. inquiry documented evidence that sections of Homs military hospital and Latakia state hospital were "transformed into torture centers actually within the hospitals," he said.

    Syrian activist: 'You hear the sounds of torture all the time'

    Torture has been documented in Syria for 40 years, "usually carried out under the cloak of permanent security legislation," Colville said, adding: "The brutality of the country's security forces is notorious."

    "Methods of torture, most of which are known to have been used in Syria over many years, not just in the past year, include severe beatings, electric shocks, suspension for long periods by the limbs, psychological torture and routine humiliation," he added.

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    Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

  • Bomb plot Briton spotlights role of Western Islamists in Africa terror

    A Briton from east London has been charged in Kenya with possession of illegal explosive material and plotting to detonate a bomb. Jermaine Grant, 29, was arrested with three Kenyan men. Police are investigating possible ties with the Islamist group al-Shabaab in Somalia. Ch4 News' Jonathan Rugman reports.

    On Thursday night, Britain's Channel 4 ran this segment about a young man from London who has been charged in Kenya with plotting to detonate a bomb, among other things.

    Jermaine Grant's alleged links with insurgents underlines the fear that some Western men traveling to Africa could form part of a growing al-Qaida presence on the continent.

    Also on Thursday, The Associated Press ran a story about Americans rising in the ranks inside of al-Shabab, an Somalia-based insurgent group linked to al-Qaida.

    The Associated Press wrote:

    A handful of young Muslims from the U.S. are taking high-visibility propaganda and operational roles inside an al-Qaida-linked insurgent force in Somalia known as al-Shabab. While most are from Minnesota, which has the largest Somali population in the nation, al-Shabab members include a Californian and an Alabaman with no ancestral ties to Somalia.

    "They are being deployed in roles that appear to be shrewdly calculated to raise al-Shabab's international profile and to recruit others, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries," said Anders Folk, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted suspected al-Shabab supporters in Minnesota.

    Officials fear another terrorist attack in East Africa. Kenya announced on Jan. 7 that it had thwarted attempted al-Shabab attacks over the holidays. The same day, Britain's Foreign Office urged Britons in Kenya to be extra vigilant, warning that terrorists there may be "in the final stages of planning attacks."

    More than 40 people have traveled from the U.S. to Somalia to join al-Shabab since 2007, and 15 of them have died, according to a report from the House Homeland Security Committee. Federal investigations into al-Shabab recruitment in the U.S. have centered on Minnesota, which has more than 32,000 Somalis.

    At least 21 men have left Minnesota to join al-Shabab in that same time. The FBI has confirmed that at least two of them died in Somalia as suicide bombers. A U.S. citizen is suspected in a third suicide bombing, and another is under investigation in connection with a fourth bombing on Oct. 29 that killed 15 people.

    Msnbc.com staff and The Associated Press contributed to this report.