The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report on the chemical attack in the city of Saraqib in 2018 is politically biased, a wide range of specialists were involved in the creation of the document, only to give pre-prepared conclusions scientific justification, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on Thursday.
"This time, to make the biased, politically biased and absolutely pseudo-professional conclusions more plausible, all imaginable and unthinkable experts were involved in the investigation, including from the field of meteorology, toxicology, weapons, geolocation, digital technology. All this in order to provide a kind of scientific basis for the allegedly only possible version of a helicopter dropping, apparently from a high altitude, a cylinder with domestic chlorine on a vacant lot in the suburb of Sarakib," Zakharova said.
"It is encouraging that the many manipulations, machinations used in the increasingly sophisticated preparation of such accusatory reports are being made public by individual, honest, politically unengaged employees of the once authoritative OPCW, which, let me recall, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for the successful chemical demilitarization of Syria," she added.
On Monday, the OPCW's Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) submitted a report concluding that the Syrian Air Force dropped a chlorine bomb on the militant-held city of Saraqib in Idlib province in February 2018. This is the second report by the IIT. The first was published on April 8, 2020, claiming that the Syrian Air Force was responsible for three incidents in the locality of al-Lataminah in Homs province in March 2017.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry
Based on materials from TASS