Allow inspectors to visit attack site expeditiously: UK
Pierce say it’s ‘very important’ that the WHO has found ‘500 cases of people reporting symptoms of a toxic gas attack,’ adds ‘it has to be a possibility’ that the Russians have tampered with evidence of the attack, ‘but I stress we don’t yet have the fact
UNITED NATIONS: Britain’s UN ambassador said on Thursday the Russian sand syrians must up hold the promises they made to let chemical weapons inspectors visit the site of a suspected poisonous gas attack in the Damascus suburb of Douma — and “it should happen expeditiously.”
Karen Pierce said in an interview with The Associated Press that “it’s incumbent upon them more than ever to allow the team in, to escort it, to make sure it’s safe, and to make sure it can do its work.”
Pierce said it’s “very important” that the World Health Organization (WHO), a UN body, “has found at least 500 cases of people reporting the symptoms of a toxic gas attack.”
Pierce said “it has to be a possibility” that the Russians have tampered with evidence of the attack, “but I stress we don’t yet have the facts.”
And she said whether it’s now too late for the inspectors to go to Douma “would depend on the extent to which the Syrians and their Russian allies have been trying to clean up sites where chemical weapons were suspected of being used.”
The UN has promised a written report on Tuesday’s shootings at UN security team, and the OPCW fact-inding mission will also produce a report on whether chemical weapons were used, and if so what kind, Pierce said.
Asked her response to Syrians who say the airstrikes actually burnished Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s image and made him look like a survivor against “Western aggression,” Pierce said: “I don’t think it burnished his image at all.”
“I think it’s exposed him as a suspected war criminal who gasses and attacks and bombs his own people with illegal weapons,” she said. “That, I think, is the most important point here.”
Pierce and the other ambassadors on the UN Security Council are heading to Sweden for their annual retreat with Secretary-general Antonio Gutteres this weekend, where the council’s deep divisions and failure to end the sevenyear Syrian conlict are expected to be a key issue.
Guterres wants to relaunch the Geneva political process aimed at restoring peace to the country.
Pierce said the United Kingdom can work with Russia in the Security Council on issues like Somalia and Colombia which were on its agenda this week, “but on the biggest conlict issue of the day, Syria, they are proving very, very dificult to work with.”