OREANDA-NEWS. The West is trying to "crawl away" from the facts about the chemical weapons incident in the Syrian Duma, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. "There are plenty of facts that incriminate Western partners in a lie. Starting from the way they now want to crawl away from any discussion of the evidence that surfaced about what took place on April 7 last year in Eastern Ghouta. Honest people who could not step over their professional pride and wrote the truth", - said Lavrov at a briefing in Moscow.

According to him, the leadership of the technical secretariat of the OPCW mission "refuses to have a briefing with the participation of all the experts who investigated the incident in the Duma in April 2018". The OPCW on March 1 published a report on the results of the investigation of the incident in the city of Duma in Eastern Guta on April 7, 2018, which states that the attack used a "toxic chemical, probably chlorine". As stated in the engineering assessment, "observations made at two sites of the incident, along with subsequent analysis, suggest that the cylinders were most likely put down, not dropped from the air".

Earlier, the West accused Damascus of himatak on the city of Duma. As evidence of a chemical attack, the White Helmets organization used footage that captured residents of the Duma, including children whom doctors allegedly were trying to save from the effects of toxic substances.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the purpose of injections about the use of toxic substances by the Syrian troops is to shield the terrorists and to justify the possible force strikes from outside. At the same time, in March, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation reported on the upcoming militants in Eastern Gut, where the Duma is located, provocations with the staging of the use of chemical weapons.