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Chemical evidence fades as UN team under fire
[OMANOBSERVER] As UN weapons inspectors came under fire in Syria yesterday, the evidence of an apparent large-scale chemical weapons attack they are seeking is already fading from the scene. The longer it takes the 20-member team to get to the spot where rockets carrying nerve agents are said to have killed hundreds of people on August 21, the harder it will be for the mission led by Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom to find meaningful remnants of toxic munitions. With Western powers considering military strikes against Syria if they conclude it has used gas-laden rockets in an escalation of the country's two-and-half-year civil war, reliable evidence will be key to their deliberations. Traces of chemicals on munitions fragments, buildings and impact craters will already have degraded. It will also have become difficult to detect anything in the urine of inhabitants in the outskirts of Damascus. Perpetrators will have had days to try to cover up proof of the attack, experts said.Ralf Trapp, a disarmament expert who worked for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is supplying experts to the UN team, said traces of chemicals in a victim's urine fade within days, though blood could contain traces for weeks. "They should be collected as soon after the incident as possible, preferably within a couple of weeks after the alleged use," Trapp said. Some feared that the UN team would arrive too late to gather any meaningful samples. Former UN adviser George A Lopez Of the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, accused Syria of applying "calculated manoeuvres" on the ground in Damascus to counter UN and world reaction. "Syrian forces continued conventional shelling of the area, while locals and others cleared away bodies," he said. "This hastened breakdown and contamination of chemical compounds needed to provide undeniable proof of the type of gas, its concentration level, and its source to the inspectors, who may still be one or more days away from taking soil and other samples." In a conflict that is dividing world powers, inspectors will also have to safeguard the integrity of the samples. They have to make sure containers and vials transported to the laboratories for analysis follow a strict chain of custody, with fibre-optic seals and accompanied by exhaustive documentation "to be able to demonstrate that the samples have not been tempered with", Trapp said. Posted by: Fred 2013-08-27 |
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