French say samples prove Syria responsible for deadly gas attack

ANALYSIS OF samples taken from a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria earlier this month “bears the signature” of President Bashar Assad’s government laboratories and shows it was responsible for the deadly assault, France’s foreign minister said.

According to Jean-Marc Ayrault, France came to this conclusion after comparing samples from a sarin attack in Syria from 2013 that matched.

The Kremlin promptly denounced the French report, saying the samples are not enough to prove who was behind it.

France knows “from sure sources” that “the manufacturing process of the sarin that was sampled is typical of the method developed in Syrian laboratories”, Mr Ayrault added.

“This method bears the signature of the regime and that is what allows us to establish its responsibility in this attack.”

France’s Foreign Ministry said that blood samples were taken from a victim in Syria on the day of the attack in the oppositionheld town of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 in which more than 80 people were killed.

Environmental samples, the French ministry said, show the weapons were made “according to the same production process than the one used in the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Sarabeq”.

France’s presidency said the country’s intelligence services presented evidence which “demonstrate that the (Syrian) regime still holds chemical warfare agents, in violation of the commitments to eliminate them that it took in 2013”.

It’s thought that President Assad’s government still has a stockpile of hundreds of tonnes of chemical weapons, despite saying it had handed over all of them.