France ties Syria to sarin attack

Samples reported to match production process of Assad’s labs

PARIS — France said Wednesday that the chemical analysis of samples taken from a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria earlier this month offers evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government was responsible.

Foreign Minister JeanMarc Ayrault said France reached that conclusion after finding that samples from a 2013 sarin attack in Syria matched the new samples. The findings were published Wednesday in a six-page report.

Russia, a close ally of Assad, denounced the French report, saying the samples and the fact that the nerve agent was used are not enough to prove who was behind the attack. Assad has denied that his forces used chemical weapons and claimed that evidence of a poison-gas attack is fabricated.

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

“This method bears the signature of the regime, and that is what allows us to establish its responsibility in this attack,” he said, adding that France is working to bring those behind the “criminal” atrocities to international justice.

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

Environmental samples, the French ministry said, show the weapons were made “according to the same production process as the one used in the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Saraqeb” on April 29, 2013.

Ayrault said French intelligence showed that only Syrian government forces could be behind such an attack — by a bomber taking off from the Shayrat air base, which was later targeted in a retaliatory U.S. missile strike.

France’s presidential office said the country’s intelligence services presented evidence showing the Syrian government “still holds chemical warfare agents, in violation of the commitments to eliminate them that it took in 2013.” The office said that evidence will be made public, but it offered no further details.

It’s thought that Assad’s government still has a stockpile of tons of chemical weapons, despite its claim that it handed over all of them.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia’s position on the attack is “unchanged” and that “the only way to establish the truth about what happened … is an impartial international investigation.”

Russia has previously called for an international inquiry, and Peskov expressed disappointment that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has turned down the Syrian government’s offers to visit the site of the attack.

The French minister’s comments came as the chemical-weapons agency, which is investigating the April 4 attack, held a ceremony in the Netherlands marking the 20th anniversary of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

In a video message during the ceremony at The Hague, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the organization’s progress in eliminating chemical weapons is now under threat.

“In the Middle East, belligerents are breaking the norm against chemical weapons,” he said. “The recent attack in Syria was a horrific reminder of the stakes. There can be no impunity for these crimes.”

The United States also has blamed Assad’s government for this month’s attack. President Donald Trump’s administration ordered the cruise missile attack on the air base and issued sanctions on 271 people linked to the Syrian agency said to be responsible for producing nonconventional weapons.

Earlier Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the U.S. strike damaged the prospects of a political settlement for the war-torn country.

Lavrov told a security conference in Moscow that the U.S. response “pushes the prospect for a wide international front on terror even further away.”

He also dismissed claims that international experts cannot visit the site in Khan Sheikhoun because of security precautions, and he criticized the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for failing to go there. Lavrov said claims that the experts were warned by the United Nations against traveling to the location because it’s unsafe are “lies,” adding that Moscow went back to the U.N. and found out there was no such warning.