Uli Gack, a reporter with the German ZDF public broadcaster, speaking live on ZDF Heute (‘Today’) show on Saturday, referred to the Douma incident and said: "People told us in a very convincing manner that this whole story was staged."
Gack had travelled to Syria and visited one of the refugee camps near Damascus, where some 20,000 people from Eastern Ghouta and particularly from Douma were living.
Gack said the scene of the attack, which allegedly took place on April 7, was in fact the “command post” of a local militant group, citing the witnesses he was able to speak to at the refugee camp.
He went on to say that, according to the locals, the militants brought canisters containing chlorine to the area and “actually waited for the Syrian Air Force to bomb the place, which was of particular interest for them.”
When the Syrian army eventually struck the place, the chlorine canisters exploded. According to other witness accounts, the militants deliberately exposed people to chemical agents (chlorine ) during what they called “training exercises” then filmed it and later presented it as “evidence” of the alleged chemical attack in Douma.
The reporter then said he could not verify the people’s statements and cannot say if they are all true but called them quite “convincing” and added that they deserve attention.
The purported chemical incident in Douma allegedly took place on April 7. A week later, Washington and its allies launched a massive retaliatory missile strike against Syria, without even waiting for the Organization for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to start its investigation of the incident.
Western media have also embarked on a massive campaign of accusing Moscow and Damascus of “blocking” the OPCW investigators from accessing the scene of the alleged attack. Uli Gack, however, also dismissed this particular narrative, saying that the delay in the OPCW team’s work may indeed have been caused by "security issues".
