The Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a “massive crime scene”, with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre, The Guardian reported Friday.

Six weeks after the RSF seized the city, corpses have been gathered together in scores of piles to await burial in mass graves or cremated in huge pits, analysis indicates.

With the capital of North Darfur state still sealed off to outsiders, including UN war crimes investigators, satellite evidence has revealed a network of newly dug incineration and burial pits thought to be for the disposal of large numbers of bodies.

While the final death toll of the massacre remains unclear, British MPs have been briefed that at least 60,000 have been murdered in El Fasher.

As many as 150,000 residents of El Fasher remain unaccounted for since the city fell to the RSF. They are not thought to have left the city, and this grisly development comes amid increasingly gloomy speculation about their fate.

Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been closely analyzing satellite images of El Fasher, said the city was eerily empty, with once-bustling markets now desolate.

Yale’s latest analysis suggests marketplaces are now so unused that they are becoming overgrown and that all the livestock appears to have been moved out of the city,which had 1.5 million inhabitants before the war began in April 2023.

“It’s beginning to look a lot like a slaughterhouse,” said Raymond.

Human rights experts now believe El Fasher is likely to be the worst war crime of the Sudanese civil war, which is already characterized by mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

Over 32 months of ruinous war, the country has been torn apart, with as many as 400,000 people killed and almost 13 million displaced. The conflict has caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

Meanwhile, there have been renewed calls for a thorough investigation into an RSF attack on the Zamzam displacement camp seven miles (12km) south of El Fasher six months earlier.

A new report by Amnesty International documents how the RSF targeted civilians, took hostages, and destroyed mosques and schools during a large-scale attack on Zamzam camp. It has called for the RSF to be “investigated for war crimes”.