Come clean on sarin

IT has been quite shocking to see the use of nerve agent sarin in the attack that killed more than 80 and injured hundreds of others in Syria’s province of Idlib last week.

however, what is more disturbing, and what the British public have a right to know, is the role the UK Government played in the Assad regime’s development of a chemical weapons programme.

The UK Government has itself admitted that in the 1980s the UK exported the chemicals necessary to make sarin to the Syrian regime. The UK also sold specialist equipment after the millennium which it now appears was diverted to the chemical weapons programme.

In July 2014, the then foreign secretary, William hague, confirmed to Parliament that the UK had indeed exported chemicals that ‘were likely to have been diverted for use in the Syrian programme’.

he added: ‘From the information we hold, we judge it likely that these chemical exports by UK companies were subsequently used by Syria in their programmes to produce nerve agents, including sarin.’

In the past the UK has been far too lax over the sale of such chemicals, something that improved with the implementation of EU-wide and other international measures. The UK should be ensuring that these standards aren’t compromised when pursuing Brexit trade deals and that all the relevant controls are maintained or tightened still further.

By the UK Government’s own admission it has sold components to Syria that can be used in the production of chemical weapons. It must now conduct a full investigation to determine if they were used in these terrible attacks and publish a list of other regimes and governments they have been sold to.

ALEX ORR, Edinburgh.