PARIS — France said the chemical analysis of samples taken from a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria earlier this month “bears the signature” of President Bashar Assad’s government and shows it was responsible.
Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said France came to this conclusion after comparing samples from a 2013 sarin attack in Syria that matched the new ones. The findings came in a six-page report published Wednesday.
In Damascus, Syrian opposition activists and a monitor reported Thursday that a large explosion rocked the Syrian capital, followed by a fire near Damascus airport.
The head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Rami Abdurrahman said the explosion was heard across the capital, jolting residents awake. He said the explosion is reported to have occurred near the Damascus airport road.
Activist-operated Diary of a Mortar, which reports from Damascus, said the blast near the airport road was followed by flames rising above the area. The pro-government site Damascus Now said the explosion was near the city’s Seventh Bridge, which leads to the airport road.
Russia, a close ally of Assad, promptly denounced the French report Wednesday, saying the samples and the fact the nerve agent was used are not enough to prove who was behind it. Assad has repeatedly denied his forces used chemical weapons and claimed that myriad evidence of a poison gas attack is made up.
But Ayrault said France knows “from sure sources” that “the manufacturing process of the sarin that was sampled is typical of the method developed in Syrian laboratories.”
“This method bears the signature of the regime and that is what allows us to establish its responsibility in this attack,” he added, saying that France is working to bring those behind the “criminal” atrocities to international justice.
France’s Foreign Ministry said blood samples were taken from a victim in Syria on the day of the April 4 attack in the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun, which killed more than 80 people.
Environmental samples, the French ministry said, show the weapons were made “according to the same production process as the one used in the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Saraqeb” on April 29, 2013.