UN has 'wealth' of evidence on Syrian chemical attack: report

UN inspectors have collected a "wealth" of evidence suggesting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used nerve agents against his own people, according to a media report.
The UN inspection team, set to present a highly anticipated report on a suspected August 21 chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, will not directly accuse the Syrian regime of gassing its own people, Foreign Policy magazine reported on its website.
But it will provide a strong circumstantial case - based on an examination of spent rocket casings, ammunition and laboratory tests of soil, blood and urine samples - that points strongly in the direction of the Syrian government's culpability, three UN-based diplomats familiar with the investigation were quoted as saying.

"I know they have gotten very rich samples - biomedical and environmental - and they have interviewed victims, doctors and nurses," said one unnamed Western official.
"It seems they are very happy with the wealth of evidence they got," he said.
The official could not identify specific agents detected by the inspector team, but said: "You can conclude from the type of evidence the (identity of the) author".

The UN team, led by Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom, travelled to Damascus last month to investigate the alleged chemical weapons attack over which the US threatened to launch a military intervention.
Syrian forces allegedly launched a chemical attack that killed more than 1,400 people in the al-Ghouta suburb of Damascus.

Syria and Russia have denied that the government in Damascus carried out the attack, saying it was the work of Syrian rebels seeking to persuade the West to intervene militarily.
Assad denied his government used chemical weapons in an interview and compared the US case against Syria to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell's flawed presentation against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
While Western diplomats said they are confident the UN report would strengthen the case against the Syrian regime, they said they expected the case would not fundamentally alter the course of diplomatic efforts to contain the chemical weapons threat in Syria, the report said.

"It's not a game changer," said one of the diplomats.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reached an agreement to control and ultimately destroy Syria's chemical weapons after days of talk in Geneva.
Ban has revealed that he expects the UN report to give "overwhelming" confirmation that chemical arms were used in the attack. He said he was considering urging the Security Council to demand the immediate transfer of Syria's chemical weapons to places inside Syria where they can be safely stored and destroyed.