Were those kids dead at all? Assad asks

Damascus, April 13: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said a suspected chemical weapons attack was a “fabrication” to justify a US military strike.

In an interview in Damascus — his first since the alleged April 4 attack prompted a US air strike on Syrian forces — Assad said his army had given up all its chemical weapons and that Syrian military power was not affected by the US strike. He also poured doubts on the images and videos that had shown children who had died in the suspected chemical attack.

“Definitely, 100 per cent for us, it's fabrication,” he said in the interview late on Wednesday, Damascus time.

“Our impression is that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-inglove with the terrorists.

They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack.”

The suspected attack killed at least 87 people, including many children, and images of the dead and of suffering victims provoked global outrage.

In the interview, Assad insisted it was “not clear” whether an attack on Khan Sheikhun had even happened. “You have a lot of fake videos now,” he said.

“We don’t know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhun. Were they dead at all?” he said.

The president insisted several times that his forces had turned over all chemical weapons stockpiles in 2013, under a deal brokered by Russia to avoid threatened US military action. — AFP