SYRIAN GOVERNMENT'S SARIN?

A man holds the body of a dead child among bodies of people activists
 say were killed by nerve gas in the Ghouta, Damascus, August 21, 2013

THE HAGUE : Tests link Syrian government stockpile to largest Sarin attack.

The Syrian government's stockpile has been linked for the first time by laboratory tests to the largest Sarin nerve agent attack of the civil war, diplomats and scientists told Reuters-

Supporting Western claims that government forces under President Bashar al-Assad were behind the atrocity.

Laboratories working for the organization for the Prohibition of  Chemical Weapons compared samples taken by a UN mission in Damascus suburb of Ghouta after the Aug 21, 2013 attack-

When hundreds of civilians died of  sarin gas poisoning, to chemicals handed over by Damascus for destruction in 2014.

The tests found  ''markers''  in samples taken at  Ghouta and the sites of two other nerve agent attacks, in the towns of  Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib governorate on April 4, 2017 and  Khan-al-Assal, Aleppo in March 2013, two people involved in the process said.

''We compared Khan, Sheikhoun, Khan al-Assal, Ghouta,'' said one source who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the findings.

''There were signatures in all three of them that matched.''

The same test results were the basis for a report by the  OPCW-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism in October which said-

The Syrian government was responsible for the  Khan Sheikhoun attack, which killed dozens.

The findings on Ghouta, whose details were confirmed to Reuters by two separate diplomatic sources, were not released in the October report to the UN Security Council because they were not part of the team's mandate.

They will nonetheless  bolster claims  by the United States, Britain and other Western powers that  Assad's government  still possesses and-

Uses banned munitions in violation of the  Security Council resolutions and the  Chemical Weapons Convention. [Agencies].