BBC owns up to lie about Syria chemical attack

Saeed Pourreza
Press TV, London

In what’s been described as a victory for truth, a western mainstream media channel has been found to have lied about an alleged chemical and biological weapons attack in Syria more than three years ago. The BBC has announced that a documentary it aired last year contained "serious flaws."

The hospital scenes of the April 7 2018 alleged chemical attack on the Syrian city of Douma are seared in the minds of people around the world. Blaming it on the Syrian government, western mainstream media among them the UK’s public broadcaster the BBC gave it extensive coverage.

One such coverage included BBC 4 documentary Mayday: The Canister On The Bed, which aired November last year, prompting complaints of inaccuracies. Nearly 10 months later, the Corporation’s own Executive Complaints Unit has found that the documentary prepared by one of its investigative journalists contained glaring errors, in other words- ‘’blatant lies.’’

The Syrian government denied ever having chemical weapons much less use them against its own people. But that didn’t stop the US, France and the UK from carrying out a series of military strikes against multiple government sites in Syria.

That was followed by an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW. But that didn’t end well. The organization was called upon by many, among them some of its own former members, to stop suppressing its findings.

Doubts about the veracity of what went down in Douma were raised before the recent BBC embarrassment. In 2019, BBC producer, Riam Dalati, dropped a bombshell saying the video footage of the alleged chemical attack had been staged:

"After almost six months of investigations, I can prove without a doubt that the #Douma Hospital scene was staged. No fatalities occurred in the hospital.’’

And in the lead-up to the incident, Russia had warned it could happen- that the terrorists who controlled Douma at the time could stage a chemical attack and invite foreign intervention and derail an evacuation deal.

More than three years since the incident, the clouds of western mainstream media propaganda and misinformation have cleared, and the truth has come out for everyone to see.

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