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Tests Link Syrian Government Stockpile to Largest Sarin Gas Attack
(Reuters) Anthony Deutsch - The Syrian government's chemical weapons stockpile has been linked for the first time by laboratory tests to the largest sarin nerve agent attack of the civil war, diplomats and scientists told Reuters, supporting Western claims that Assad's forces were behind the atrocity. Laboratories working for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons compared samples taken by a UN mission in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta after the Aug. 21, 2013, attack, when hundreds of civilians died of sarin gas poisoning, to chemicals handed over by Damascus for destruction in 2014. The tests found "markers" in samples taken at Ghouta and at the sites of two other nerve agent attacks, in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017, and Khan al-Assal in March 2013. Inspectors have found proof of an ongoing chemical weapons program in Syria, including the systematic use of chlorine barrel bombs and sarin, which they say was ordered at the highest levels of government.