PRESS RELEASE
Assad, Lavrov: The ‘Chemical Weapon’ Incident Was Staged To Push Regime Change
April 14, 2017 (EIRNS)—In a 40-minute interview with Agence France Presse, his first since the April 4 chemical weapon incident, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad categorically denied that Syria had carried out the attack.
"Definitely, 100% for us, it’s a fabrication," he stated. All of the so-called "evidence" presented, including videos of dying children, is fake. "We don’t know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhoun. Were they dead at all?" Assad added:
"Our impression is that the West, mainly the U.S., is hand-in-glove with the terrorists. They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack."
He urged that an impartial international investigation be conducted, warning:
"We can only allow any investigation when it’s impartial, when we make sure that unbiased countries will participate in this delegation in order to make sure that they won’t use it for politicized purposes."
American statesman Lyndon LaRouche concurred that Assad’s evaluation is "highly plausible."
Similarly, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held a press conference after meeting with his Syrian and Iranian counterparts today.
"There is growing evidence that this [the American attack] was staged," he stated. "There are too many inconsistencies, discrepancies in the version used to justify the April 7 aggressive action." Lavrov said this was an attemt at regime-change in Syria, and reported that since Russia presented evidence to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] that the anti-Assad opposition in Syria had used chemical weapons in Aleppo, "no reaction has been recevied from the [OPCW] secretariat."
A day earlier, after a meeting in Moscow with Syria’s foreign minister, Lavrov had stated:
"I want to emphasize the extremely provocative role of the U.S. missile strike at the Shayrat airfield. The U.S. Secretary of State and I thoroughly discussed the situation, and agreed that this should not happen again."
Lavrov added pointedly that progress had been achieved on a negotiated solution in the Astana format, but
"this progress is not pleasing to everyone. It is principally important to not succumb to provocations, amid the hysteria unleashed in the West, and not allow it to destroy the efforts within the framework of the Astana process and the Geneva process."
