Syria rejects US, UK chemical arms claims
Syria dismissed American and British claims that it may have used chemical arms as a "barefaced lie" as a ground-to-ground missile killed at least four civilians in northern Syrian at dawn yesterday.
said in an interview published on the Kremlin-funded Russia Today's website.
Denying west's claims, Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi said that Syria would never use chemical weapons on civilians."
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has called on Damascus to approve a UN mission of inspectors to probe the alleged use of chemical weapons in the spiralling conflict that erupted in March 2011.
But Zohbi told Russia Today that Syria could not trust UN inspectors from Britain and the United States.
US President Barack Obama warned Syria on Friday that using chemical weapons would be a "game changer", after the US, Israel and Britain cited signs that Assad's regime has used the deadly agent sarin.
And British Prime Minister David Cameron said the growing evidence that Assad had turned chemical agents on his own people was "extremely serious".
On the ground, in an attempt to weaken the Syrian government's air power, rebel fighters attacked several military airports across the country yesterday-- including a sprawling base in Idlib province, dissidents said.
Syrian troops and rebels battled for control of Idlib's Abu al-Zhuhoor military airport, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Minnegh airport in the Aleppo and Hama military airport were also came under attack.
In a separate development, a ground-to-ground missile was fired on a town in northern Syrian at dawn and killed at least four civilians, two of them children, a watchdog reported.
Anti-regime activists of the Aleppo Media Centre said the missile, which slammed into a residential area of Tal Rifaat, was a Scud, although this could not be independently verified.
30 people were wounded and 10 houses destroyed in the attack.
The attack also killed two women, wounded several other people and destroyed many homes in the town in Aleppo province, the Britain-based Observatory said.
Comments