{"id":79704,"date":"2013-09-13T07:55:40","date_gmt":"2013-09-13T07:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=79704"},"modified":"2013-09-17T08:12:38","modified_gmt":"2013-09-17T08:12:38","slug":"flashback-u-n-has-testimony-that-syrian-rebels-used-sarin-gas-investigator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=79704","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas – investigator"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reuters — May 5, 2013<\/h1>\n

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Syrian rebels chemical weapon artillary canister. See video links below<\/p><\/div>\n

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria\u2019s civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The\u00a0United Nations\u00a0independent commission of inquiry on\u00a0Syria\u00a0has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cOur investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,\u201d Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cThis was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,\u201d she added, speaking in Italian.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, gave no details as to when or where sarin may have been used.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Geneva-based inquiry into war crimes and other human rights violations is separate from an investigation of the alleged use of chemical weapons in\u00a0Syria\u00a0instigated by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which has since stalled.<\/span><\/p>\n

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President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s government and the rebels accuse each another of carrying out three chemical weapon attacks, one near Aleppo and another near Damascus, both in March, and another in Homs in December.\u00a0The civil war began with anti-government protests in March 2011. The conflict has now claimed an estimated 70,000 lives and forced 1.2 million Syrian refugees to flee.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Based on CIA and media reports, the United States has said it has \u201cvarying degrees of confidence\u201d that sarin has been used by Syria\u2019s government on its people. However, this is the first time an independent UN commission has confirmed the use of chemical weapons by any party in the Syrian civil war, confirming that Syrian rebels were guilty of the crime.<\/span><\/p>\n

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President\u00a0Barack Obama\u00a0last year declared that the use or deployment of chemical weapons by Assad would cross a \u201cred line\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

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(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)<\/span><\/p>\n

Source <\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Months before the Al Ghouta gas attack, U.N. inquiry heard testimony that ‘Syrian rebels’ had used chemical weapons <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":79700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[90,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-al-ghouta-gas-attack","category-syria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79704"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80021,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79704\/revisions\/80021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/79700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}