Now Russia says Syria chemical attack might have been staged

Russian, Syrian and Iranian foreign ministers want an independent investigation and say those who oppose the call "don't have a conscience."

MOSCOW // Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said a chemical weapons attack in Syria that provoked US missile strikes on the country may have been orchestrated.

“There’s growing evidence that this was staged,” Mr Lavrov said at a news conference with his Iranian and Syrian counterparts on Friday.

Publications in the US and the UK, among others, have highlighted “many inconsistencies” in the version of events in Syria’s Idlib province that was used to justify the American air strikes, he said.

Russia, Iran and Syria want an independent investigation and those opposed to the call “don’t have a clear conscience”, the minister added. Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution on Wednesday that demanded the Syrian government cooperate with an inquiry into the suspected sarin gas attack that killed dozens of people.

US president Donald Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Shayrat airbase in Syria last week after his administration accused Russia of trying to cover up the role of Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad in the chemical weapons attack.

Russia contends the chemicals belonged to terrorists. Mr Lavrov called on the US not to repeat the air strikes, which he said were part of efforts to oust Mr Al Assad that will not succeed. He also criticised the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), for not sending experts to Khan Sheikhoun, where the poison gas was unleashed, but instead analysing samples taken from the site or from the victims.

“We consider it unacceptable to analyse events from a distance,” Mr Lavrov said.

The foreign minister said Mr Assad’s opponents had “in essence” given guarantees for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to visit the location where at least 87 people died, but the watchdog was refusing to send them.

“They say still that it is not very safe, but they cannot put forward convincing arguments,” he said.

The Syrian crisis dominated Moscow talks between US secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Russian president Vladimir Putin on Wednesday as the Kremlin rebuffed demands to abandon Mr Al Assad.

Mr Putin’s military backing of Mr Al Assad has been crucial in keeping his government in power after six years of civil war. On Friday the Russian president was also leaning towards the same conclusion as his foreign minister regarding the poison gas attack. Speaking in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where Mr Putin was attending a collective defence meeting of former Soviet republics, his spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the US had produced no evidence that Mr Al Assad was responsible for the April 4 attack in Idlib.

The US “is confident that the Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons attack, using the nerve agent sarin, against its own people”, according to a four-page document published by officials in Washington on Tuesday that contained satellite images, reports from the scene and details of exposure gathered from victims.

Russia claimed Syrian forces struck a building where terrorists kept the internationally banned chemical. The US claimed it has images proving the bomb left a crater in a road rather than hitting a building.

The OPCW says a fact-finding mission was analysing samples gathered from “various sources” and that allegations of a chemical attack in the Syrian rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun were “credible”

* Bloomberg