A United Nations team today visits the site of the alleged chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus. But US officials have said that the UN team is unlikely to reach a definitive conclusion as any evidence has probably been destroyed by heavy shelling in the area over the past few days. A US official said the probe is “too late to be credible.”
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad continued to insist that his forces did not use chemical weapons. "Would any state use chemicals or any other weapons of mass destruction in a place where its own forces are concentrated? That would go against elementary logic. So accusations of this kind are entirely political," he told the Russian newspaper Izvestia in an interview.
At the same time, several US officials were quoted as saying there was “little doubt” that Assad’s troops had used sarin gas in an attack last week that reportedly killed hundreds of civilians. President Obama has repeatedly said that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” for the US.