US fails to present hard evidence of Syria chemical attack

Russia: US fails to present hard evidence of Syria chemical attack
2 September, 2013 – Al Akhbar

The United States has failed to present concrete evidence that the Syrian government was behind last month’s alleged chemical attack in a Damascus suburb, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday.

Moscow vehemently opposes US-led plans for a military assault against the government of President Bashar al-Assad in response to the alleged attack, even though the timetable has now been put back by President Barack Obama’s decision to put it to Congress.

“What we were shown before and most recently by our American partners as well as the British and the French absolutely does not convince us,” Lavrov said at a university lecture in Moscow.

“And when you ask for more detailed evidence, they say that it is all secret and they cannot show you. Thus, there are no such facts for the purposes of international cooperation,” he added.

President Vladimir Putin said over the weekend it would have been “utter nonsense” for the government to launch such an attack when it has the military ascendancy.

Lavrov said Russia had been shown some evidence by the West but doubted its validity, saying “there was nothing concrete, without geographic coordinates or names.”

He accused the West of concealing comments by “many experts” who have expressed “serious doubts” about the validity of the video footage of the attack posted on the Internet.

“If we are going to state that these are pictures of the use of chemical arms and of the effects on the victims then there is a mass of disparities and absurdities,” Lavrov said.

“There are very many doubts,” he said. “There are no facts, just talk that ‘we probably know this,'” he added.

The dispute between the West and Russia over Syria is expected to be at the center of the G20 summit which is to be hosted by Putin later this week in Saint Petersburg. …source