Syrian rebels used sarin gas - UN investigator
SWITZERLAND: Syrian rebels have made use of the deadly nerve
agent sarin in their war-torn country’s conflict, UN human rights
investigator Carla del Ponte has said. “According to the testimonies we
have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of
sarin gas,” del Ponte, a former war crimes prosecutor, said in an
interview with Swiss radio late on Sunday.
“We still have to deepen our investigation, verify and confirm (the
findings) through new witness testimony, but according to what we have
established so far, it is at the moment opponents of the regime who are
using sarin gas,” she added. She stressed that the UN commission of
inquiry on Syria, which she is a part of, had far from finished its
investigation.
The commission, which is set to present its latest findings to the UN
Human Rights Council during its next session in June, might still find
proof that the Syrian regime was also using this type of chemical
weapons, del Ponte said. Sarin is a powerful neurotoxin developed by
Nazi scientists in the 1930s.
Originally developed as a pesticide, sarin was used to deadly effect
in the 1988 raid on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq. A
Japanese cult also used sarin in two attacks in the 1990s. The gas works
by being inhaled or absorbed through the skin and kills by crippling the
nervous system.
Symptoms include nausea and violent headaches, blurred or tunnel
vision, drooling, muscular convulsions, respiratory arrest, loss of
consciousness and then death, according to the US Centres for Disease
Control and Prevention.
In high doses, sarin paralyses the muscles around the lungs and
prevents chemicals from “switching off” the body’s secretions, so
victims suffocate or drown as their lungs fill with mucus and saliva.
Even a tiny dose of sarin -- which, like other nerve gases such as soman,
tabun and VX, is odourless, colourless and tasteless -- can be deadly if
it enters the respiratory system, or if a drop comes into contact with
the skin.
AFP
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