U.N. investigator: sarin gas used by Syrian opposition fighters

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U.N. investigator: sarin gas used by Syrian opposition fighters

In a video uploaded on the web of a shelling that took place in Damascus's Douma, traces of chemical weapons were spotted on camera. (Al Arabiya)

The deadly nerve agent sarin has been used by Syrian opposition fighters during the war-torn country's conflict, U.N. human rights investigator Carla del Ponte said late Sunday.

"According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas," del Ponte, a former war crimes prosecutor, said in an interview with Swiss radio late on Sunday, according to AFP news agency.

"We still have to deepen our investigation, verify and confirm (the findings) through new witness testimony, but according to what we have established so far, it is at the moment opponents of the regime who are using sarin gas," she added.

She stressed that the U.N. commission of inquiry on Syria, which she is a part of, had far from finished its investigation.

The commission, which is set to present its latest findings to the UN Human Rights Council during its next session in June, might still find proof that the Syrian regime was also using this type of chemical weapons, del Ponte said.

Sarin is a powerful neurotoxin developed by Nazi scientists in the 1930s.

Originally developed as a pesticide, sarin was used to deadly effect in the 1988 raid on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq. A Japanese cult also used sarin in two attacks in the 1990s.

The gas works by being inhaled or absorbed through the skin and kills by crippling the nervous system.

Symptoms include nausea and violent headaches, blurred or tunnel vision, drooling, muscular convulsions, respiratory arrest, loss of consciousness and then death, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

In high doses, sarin paralyses the muscles around the lungs and prevents chemicals from "switching off" the body's secretions, so victims suffocate or drown as their lungs fill with mucus and saliva.

Even a tiny dose of sarin -- which, like other nerve gases such as soman, tabun and VX, is odourless, colourless and tasteless -- can be deadly if it enters the respiratory system, or if a drop comes into contact with the skin.

But speculations have been rife over which side of the conflict have been allegedly using chemical weapons.

Last week, Washington acknowledged that chemical weapons were used in Syria, confirming an earlier statement by an Israeli army official that Syrian regime forces had "used lethal chemical weapons" against the opposition.

A defected Syrian regime officer told Al Arabiya last week he was ordered by the regime to use chemical agents against the rebels, but replaced the deadly sarin with liquid bleach before defecting.

"The regime used sarin gas on three occasions, and I am increasingly afraid that they will use agents more powerful than sarin. They have VX gas and mustard gas, also known as iprit," Zaker al-Saket said.

Saket explained that President Bashar Assad's army has "three types of chemical weapons: harassing chemical agents, incapacitating agents, and lethal agents." While regime forces only used harassing agents such as tear gas at the start of the uprising, he said, they gravitated toward more deadly chemical weapons as the conflict progressed.

"The regime used incapacitating agents at first, but when the world remained silent about this, and the regime thought that the international community did not care, it used lethal [chemical] weapons in more than 13 locations. The last incident was in Utaybah," he said.

In December 2012, a video uploaded on the web showing the wreckage after a shelling that took place in Douma, an area in the Damascus suburbs, purported to show chemical weapons existence. 

The video showed a fiery wreckage caused by a bomb dropped from a Syrian fighter jet. The fire was uncontainable by either water or dirt and was releasing toxic substance as it began to bubble underneath the ground.

06 May, 2013

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Source: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/05/06/U-N-investigator-sarin-gas-used-by-Syrian-opposition-fighters.html
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