Alwaght- A BBC producer says scenes from a hospital in Syria’s Douma in April 2018, allegedly showing children suffering from chemicals, were staged.
Emotive scenes of Syrian civilians, among them crying, choking, half-naked children, dominated the airwaves in April last year after militants-affiliated mouthpieces reported yet another “chemical attack by the Assad regime” in the town of Douma. Disturbing reports, including some from the controversial White Helmets, claimed scores of people had been killed and injured.
Mainstream media quickly picked up the horrific (but unverified) videos from a Douma hospital, where victims were treated after this “poison attack.” That hospital scene was enough to assemble a UN emergency session and prompt the US-led ‘coalition of the willing’ to rain down dozens of missiles on Damascus and other locations.
But Riam Dalati, a well-known BBC Syria producer who has long reported from the region, shocked his nearly 20,000 twitter followers on Wednesday, by stating that after a “six-month investigation” he has concluded, “I can prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.”
He continued in a follow-up tweet:
"Russia and at least one NATO country knew about what happened in the hospital. Documents were sent. However, no one knew what really happened at the flats apart from activists manipulating the scene there. This is why Russia focused solely on discrediting the hospital scene."
Dalati’s mention of activists at the flats “manipulating the scene there” is a reference to White Helmets and rebel activist produced footage purporting to show the deadly aftermath of a chemical attack inside a second scene — a bombed-out apartment showing dozens of dead bodies.
He said his sources among the White Helmets and the opposition were spoke to him from Idlib and the area of the Euphrates Shield operation staged by Turkey and Syrian rebels – territories outside of the Syrian government's reach – except for one person who was in Damascus.
Dalati also says that an attack “did happen” but that sarin, a weapons-grade nerve agent, was not used. He said, “we’ll have to wait for OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] to prove chlorine or otherwise.”
However, everything else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect.
The journalist said Jaysh al-Islam, an extremist faction that fought the Syrian army there, “ruled Douma with an iron fist. They co-opted activists, doctors and humanitarians with fear and intimidation."
Dalati’s revelations could have become a bombshell news report, but instead it was met with a deafening media silence. His employer preferred to distance itself from his findings. The BBC told Sputnik in a statement that Dalati was expressing “his personal opinions about some of the video footage that emerged after the attack but has not claimed that the attack did not happen".
A few hours after making the statements Dalati switched his verified Twitter account to “private”, likely after the Russian Embassy in the UK seized upon and began promoting the admission. A number of articles quickly appeared in Russian media as well.
The Russian Foreign Ministry weighed in on Thursday after the BBC producer’s admission, especially since it’s been Moscow’s position the whole time that the events surrounding the Douma attack were staged.
Russia’s TASS news agency cited ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who slammed the “theater of the absurd” connected to the April 7 events:
"The culmination of this theater of absurd may be a statement by a BBC producer who confirmed based on his own research that the footage [in Syria’s Douma] had been staged with direct participation of the White Helmets,” Zakharova said, noting that Russia wants to listen to the company’s position because it actively covered the events from the perspective of supporting the steps of the so-called US-led coalition in Syria.
Russia is now demanding that the BBC produce the results of its investigation for Moscow to review and evaluate.
