The Nation Newspaper

Tag: OPCW

  • Inspectors allowed into site of Syrian chemical attack

    Chemical weapons inspectors in Syria are to be given access to an alleged chemical attack site on Wednesday, Russia said.

    The team has been in the country since Saturday but has been denied access to the site in the town of Douma, the BBC reports.

    United States officials have raised concerns that Russia may have tampered with the site while inspectors were denied access.

    Syria and its ally Russia denied responsibility for the April 7 attack.

    Russia claimed that it was “staged.”

    Activists on the ground in Syria said the attack killed more than 40 people and injured hundreds more sheltering from bombing in basements beneath the city.

    Video footage and witness testimony suggested that gas seeped down into the basements, suffocating the victims.

    In response to the attack, the U.S, United Kingdom and France carried out targeted military strikes against Syrian chemical weapons facilities.

    Russia and Syria had cited “pending security issues to be worked out” while inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were denied access to the site of the alleged attack, said Ahmet Uzumcu, the director general of the OPCW.

    Syrian authorities instead offered the inspectors 22 witnesses who they said were at the location of the strike and could be brought to Damascus for interviews.

  • Syria UN weapons inspectors ‘attacked’

    Syria UN weapons inspectors ‘attacked’

    A convoy of chemical weapons inspectors and UN staff that was travelling to a site of an alleged chlorine gas attack in Syria has come under attack.

    The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said they were all safe and well, and were travelling back to their operating base.

    It did not say whether they had been kidnapped in Hama province, as the Syrian government earlier claimed.

    OPCW director general, Ahmet Uzumcu, expressed his concern for their safety.

    The OPCW inspectors were trying to reach the rebel-held village of Kafr Zaita, where there have been six alleged chlorine attacks in two months.

    Activists said bombs containing chlorine were dropped on Kafr Zaita twice last week

    The first report of the attack on their convoy came from the Syrian foreign ministry, which said six inspectors had been “kidnapped” along with their five Syrian drivers.

    The state news agency, Sana, quoted a statement as saying that shortly after leaving their government escort yesterday morning in the village Tayyiba Imam, a bomb had exploded beside one of the four UN-marked vehicles in the convoy.

    The remaining three vehicles then turned around and headed back to Tayyiba Imam, but two were “hijacked by armed terrorist groups” en route, the statement added.

    The government and rebels had agreed a day-long truce in the area.

     

  • Syria ‘to ship chemicals by April’

    Syria has submitted a new plan for the removal of its chemical weapons, months after the expiry of the deadline set by the international community.

    The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said Damascus hoped to ship its most dangerous chemicals abroad by the end of April. About a third of them will have been removed by the end of this week.

    Despite the delays, the head of the joint OPCW-UN mission insisted that there had been “good progress”.

    Dutch diplomat Sigrid Kaag said the end of June deadline for the total destruction or removal of Syria’s chemical arsenal was still achievable.

    Elsewhere, government forces backed by fighters from the Lebanese Shia Islamist movement Hezbollah reportedly stepped up their bombardment of Yabroud, the last rebel stronghold in the Qalamoun mountains.

  • Syria monitors win Nobel Peace Prize

    The Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the body overseeing destruction of such weapons in Syria, has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

    The Nobel Committee said it was in honour of the OPCW’s “extensive work to eliminate chemical weapons.”

    BBC says OPCW was established to enforce the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

    It recently sent inspectors to carry out the dismantling of Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons.

    The watchdog picks up a gold medal and 8m Swedish kronor ($1.25m; £780,000) as winner of the most coveted of the Nobel honours.

    Pakistani schoolgirl campaigner Malala Yousafzai and gynaecologist Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo had been tipped as favourites to take the award.

    Others who had been listed as contenders were Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning); the United States soldier convicted of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks and Maggie Gobran, an Egyptian computer scientist who abandoned her academic career to become a Coptic Christian nun and founded the charity Stephen’s Children.

    But an hour before Friday’s announcement, Norway’s public broadcaster reported the award would go to the OPCW.

    The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention has contributed to the destruction of nearly 80 per cent of the world’s chemical weapons stockpile.