Chemical weapons inspectors confirm gas cylinders were fired at a housing block in the deadly assault in April 2018

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The world’s chemical weapons watchdog has said that chlorine was used against the rebel-held Syrian town of Douma in 2018 in a long-awaited final report on the deadly attack.

The report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was based on a visit by inspectors to the site of the attack which witnesses said killed 43 people.

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Western powers led by the United States blamed the regime of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, for the incident and unleashed air strikes on military installations in response.

The Hague-based watchdog said two cylinders likely containing chlorine smashed into a housing block in the town.

The OPCW report said that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon has taken place on 7 April 2018. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine”.

But it said that it found no evidence of the use of nerve agents in Douma, which had been previously alleged by some parties in the conflict.

The findings confirmed an interim OPCW report released last July saying that traces of chlorine were found.

The report does not place blame because it was not in the OPCW’s remit at the time, although the watchdog has since been given powers to investigate responsibility for all chemical attacks in Syria back to 2014.

Russia, which backs Assad, rejected the report on Friday and said the attack was “staged” by Syrian rescue volunteers known as the White Helmets.

“In spite of all the evidence presented by Russia, Syria, and even British journalists that the Douma incident is no more than ‘white helmets’ staged provocation, technical secretariat of OPCW states in today’s report that chlorine was used in Douma as a chemical weapon,” the Russian embassy in The Hague tweeted.

The British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said Syria should now honour the vow it made in 2013 to destroy all its chemical weapons after 1,400 people were killed in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in what the UN said was an attack using the nerve agent sarin.

A team of OPCW inspectors took more than 100 samples from seven sites in Douma when they gained access to the town after being denied access for several weeks.

The OPCW said it reached its conclusions based on “witnesses’ testimonies, environmental and biomedical samples analysis results, toxicological and ballistic analyses from experts”.

The report said “two yellow industrial cylinders dedicated for pressurised gas” were found, one of which had landed on top of the housing block and crashed through it.

It said it was “possible that the cylinders were the source of the substances containing reactive chlorine”.

The OPCW said witnesses told the team there were 43 deaths related to the alleged chemical incident, “most of whom were seen in videos and photos strewn on the floor of multiple levels of an apartment building and in front of the same building”.

The videos “indicate exposure to an inhalational irritant or toxic substance” and show burns to the eyes and foaming from the mouth, although it could not directly link those to any specific substance.

The watchdog also rejected claims by the Syrian regime that the gas came from an alleged rebel chemical weapons facility and storehouse in the area.

“From the analysis of the information gathered during the on-site visits to the warehouse and facility suspected of producing chemical weapons, there was no indication of either facility being involved in their manufacture,” it said.

The report will now go to the UN security council.



