Assad says ghastly scenes were faked, blames U.S.

Vilified by accusations of using a chemical bomb, Syria’s president intensified his counterpropaganda campaign Thursday, suggesting that child actors had staged death scenes to malign him and that U.S. warplanes had bombed a terrorist warehouse full of poison gases, killing hundreds of people.

In his first interview since an April 4 attack on the northern town of Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 people, sickened hundreds and outraged the world, President Bashar Assad of Syria not only doubled down on the government’s denials of responsibility, but contended without evidence that the episode had been fabricated as a pretext for a U.S. retaliatory missile strike.

“We don’t know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhoun,” Assad told Agence France-Presse in the television interview from Damascus, which was recorded Wednesday. “Were they dead at all?”

The decision by the increasingly isolated Syrian president to give an interview to a Western news organization appeared to reflect a calculation that his best option, even in the face of incriminating evidence, was to repeatedly deny responsibility for the attack, one of the worst in the 6-year-old Syrian war.

Medical examiners in Turkey, where many of the Khan Sheikhoun victims were taken, have said that autopsies showed they had been attacked with sarin, a lethal nerve agent and a banned chemical weapon that Syria had claimed to have eradicated.

In a further sign that sarin was used, the British delegation to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global group that polices adherence to a treaty banning such munitions, said samples taken from the attack had tested positive for sarin, Reuters reported.

The interview with Assad was broadcast as the Syrian government’s news agency asserted without evidence that U.S. warplanes had bombed what it called a chemical weapons cache possessed by Islamic State militants in Syria on Wednesday, leaving hundreds dead, including “a large number of civilians, due to suffocation caused by the inhalation of toxic materials.”