U.N. Report Confirms Rockets Loaded With Sarin in Aug. 21 Attack

By RICK GLADSTONE and NICK CUMMING-BRUCE
Published: September 16, 2013

Rockets armed with the banned chemical nerve agent sarin were used in a mass killing near Damascus on Aug. 21, United Nations chemical weapons inspectors reported on Monday in the first official confirmation by scientific experts that such munitions had been deployed in the Syria conflict.

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Although the widely awaited report did not ascribe blame for the attack, it concluded that “chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.”
The inspectors, who visited the Damascus suburbs that suffered the attack and left the country with large amounts of evidence 10 days after the episode, said that “the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin” were used.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who ordered the report, received it on Sunday and presented it to the 15-member Security Council on Monday in a closed-door session.
Although the report confirmed what the United States, its allies and Human Rights Watch had already concluded about the nature of the attack, it was nonetheless regarded as important as the first purely scientific and politically neutral accounting of the facts about the weapons that were used.
The United States and its allies have accused President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of responsibility for the attack. Mr. Assad and Russia, his principal foreign ally, have said Syrian insurgents were responsible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/world/europe/syria-united-nations.html?_r=0