Syria ready for co-op with OPCW: Envoy

In a press statement on Thursday in New York, Bashar al-Jaafari said that the OPCW has informed the Syrian government that it will send a team to Syria on Thursday and Friday, the Syrian official news agency SANA reported on Thursday.

Any delay on this visit will be a result of a political pressure on the OPCW by US, UK, France and their allies to hinder the investigations, he said.

'We are ready to accompany the team wherever they want to go and at any time, as the first batch of the team arrived in Beirut,” he said.

He blamed the recent chemical weapons attack on the terrorist groups and said, 'They smuggled chemicals from Libya to Istanbul on civil airlines and the person responsible for the smuggling of these materials was Haitham al-Qassar.”

'Syria has invited the OPCW to send a fact-finding team to visit the site in question, offering all necessary facilitations for them to carry out their job in a transparent and accurate way that steers clear of political pressure exerted by the countries backing terrorist organizations,' SANA qouted an official source at the Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Ministry as saying.

9156**1771

Follow us on Twitter @IrnaEnglish