MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad earlier in the day accused Washington and London of supplying toxic agents to terrorists, stating that CS and CN substances allegedly produced by US NonLethal Technologies and UK Chemring Defence were found in weapons depots abandoned by militants in Syria's Aleppo and a Damascus suburb.
"Syria now has all the reasons and the right to address the United Nations over western-produced chemical weapons found on the territories liberated from terrorists. The information released by the Syrian Foreign Ministry once more demonstrates in full the hypocrisy of the members of the western US-led coalition, and proves that the entire goal of the entire operation is to remove the regime of President Bashar Assad," Slutsky told reporters.
He added that in order to reach that goal, the western countries were ready to do everything from spreading fake news to actually supporting terrorists.
On April 4, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces announced that several dozen people had been killed by a suspected chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun in Syria's province of Idlib. Four days later, the United States fired missiles against the Syrian government airbase in Idlib in response to the alleged chemical weapons attack, which he White House blamed on Damascus without providing evidence.
Syrian authorities have refuted any involvement in the incident, saying that the complete elimination of the Syrian government's stockpile of chemical weapons was confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in January 2016.