WikiLeaks publishes new documents showing OPCW manipulated report on Douma incident

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London, SANA – WikiLeaks published four new leaked documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) showing that the organization manipulated the final report on the alleged chemical attack in Douma.

One of the documents is minutes from a meeting on 6 June 2018 where four staff members of the OPCW had discussions with “three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist” for the purpose of “eliciting expert opinions from the forensic toxicologists” on “whether the symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure to chlorine or other reactive chlorine gas.”

The minutes stated that the experts were “conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure,” and that “the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.”

Another document is an e-mail exchange dated 27 and 28 February, which includes an e-mail from Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW, where he instructs that an engineering report from Ian Henderson should be removed from the secure registry of the organization, along with “all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever.”

The main finding of Henderson in that report was that the two cylinders that were found on the site of the alleged attack in Douma were more likely manually placed there than dropped from a plane or helicopter from considerable heights. These findings were omitted from the official final OPCW report on the incident.

The third document is a copy of OPCW e-mail exchanges from 20 to 28 August 2018 discussing the aforementioned meeting with the toxicologists, while the fourth document is an e-mail exchange from the end of July 2018 where it is stated that the eight OPCW inspectors deployed to Douma during the fact finding mission except one, a paramedic, should be excluded from discussions on the project.

Hazem Sabbagh