Syria tells Russia it has proof rebels used chemicals

Mr Ryabkov has been discussing the situation with Syrian officials

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also said a report by UN inspectors on the alleged use of chemical weapons was politicised, biased and one-sided.

He said the inspectors had only investigated the attack in Ghouta on 21 August, not three previous incidents.

The  UN team found http://www.un.org/disarmament/content/slideshow/Secretary_General_Report_of_CW_Investigation.pdf  the nerve agent Sarin was used in the Ghouta attack.

The report did not apportion blame for the attack but Western nations blame the government forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Damascus – backed by Russia – says opposition forces are to blame.

Meanwhile the chief UN weapons inspector, Ake Sellstrom, has told the BBC it will be difficult to find and destroy all of Syria's chemical weapons, but he believes it is “doable”.

“Of course, it will be stressful work,” he added.
Mr Sellstrom said much depended on whether the Syrian government and the opposition were willing to negotiate.

'Distorted' report
In an interview with Russian media, Mr Ryabkov said the Assad government had given him new evidence that rebel forces had used chemical weapons.

He did not give any details of what those weapons were.

“Just now we were given evidence. We need to analyse it,” he told RT news organisation.

Mr Ryabkov also criticised the UN report, saying it was “distorted, it was one-sided, the basis of information upon which it is built is not sufficient, and in any case we would need to learn and know more on what happened beyond and above that incident of 21 August”.

“We are disappointed, to put it mildly, about the approach taken by the UN secretariat and the UN inspectors, who prepared the report selectively and incompletely,” he told the RIA news agency.

The UN inspectors were originally mandated to go to Syria to investigate three alleged chemical weapons attacks – at Khan al-Assal, Sheikh Maqsoud and Saraqeb.

But after the 21 August attack in Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, their instructions changed – and the report they produced is based purely on that incident.

A further UN report on the other locations will not be released until October.

The UN experts were not required to apportion blame in their report. But Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/09/17/dispatches-mapping-sarin-flight-path  says the document reveals details of the attack that strongly suggest government forces were behind the attack.

Human Rights Watch used the details about the direction some of the rockets are thought to have come from, and worked out their trajectory. Their results indicated that the rockets were likely to have come from an area near a well-established military base.

BBC