A new version of a study produced by Mother Agnes, a catholic nun, pointing to a number of fabricated videos used as evidence of complicity by the Assad government in a recent chemical attack is in the works, she told RT.
The report by the Christian nun, Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib,
mother superior of St. James Monastery in Qara, Syria, has
alleged that many videos featuring supposed
victims of the chemical weapons attack in the Syrian village
of Guta in August were in fact staged and scripted.
The question for the nun now revolves around the
“humanitarian” question of what happened to the children
featured in the video. “Those children are the children of
whom? From where did you get them? Why are you using them and
manipulating them?”
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian
Arab Republic was created in August 2011 by the Human Rights
Council to investigate alleged violations of human rights.
RT:What exactly led you to the conclusion that the
videos of the chemical attack were fabricated?
Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib: I have been contacted by
families from the province of Lattakia. They alleged that they
discovered victims, the children that are presented as victims of
the chemical attacks in Eastern Ghouta, would be their own
children. They had asked me to interfere, so I had to study a
little bit of those videos to see where those children are
carried, because in some videos they are alive and in some videos
they seem not to be alive.
I came to identify in many videos real staging, real screen
playing and today after having redacted a study concerning my
first impression, I called it a better version.
Today I’m just finishing the chronology of those videos and of
the action they are unveiling to the public opinion. I’m more and
more convinced that it is not the coverage of an ongoing reality
, the ongoing emergency of chemical strikes, but a kind of screen
playing with a script that has been worked on many days before.
RT:Are you an expert on chemical weapons and
film-making?
MA: We see kind of manipulations of corpses. For example
in an average timeframe between 2-5 hours we see bodies that are
not cured that are not healed, we see them take them from one
place to another. They put them in a scenography way just to make
the shooting. These are not confirmed to what they are pretending
– they are showing us as they say victims of an imminent chemical
attack. So I have found a lot of screenplay and all of them, they
are very well documented. We could derive from the web the real
chronology, the real time frame of their uploading. And it is
obvious, nobody can deny this.
I’m not an expert, I’m not military, I’m not a medical expert – I
am a just an observer, a normal citizen and as a nun I’m trying
to find out what is the fate of those little children. If they
are from the North, from Lattakia, I would like to know where
they are. If they are not from North Lattakia, we also have the
proof that they have no families.
So please tell us – those children are the children of whom? From
where did you get them? Why are you using them and manipulating
them? Are they alive or are they dead? Now it is a humanitarian
case and we’re asked to bring it to the highest level of the
humanitarian and human rights community in the world.
RT:How did the UN respond to your findings?
MA: I said directly in a meeting with the commission of
inquiry that I have been viewing the videos and that my
impression was that they were a fake. They were very much
interested. They’ve asked me to transmit to them the videos as
well as my own observation.
Until today I have just transmitted to the commission of inquiry
and also to the office of the high commissioner of human rights
in Geneva my 50-page study. I did not transmit until today the
videos because I wanted to be sure about my work and I will
transmit to them, remit to them in an official way the whole work
of chronology and evidences that they will be able to see, to
view it in an audio-visual way.
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