TEHRAN (FNA)- A prominent Turkish journalist said the Ankara government has played a key role in arming the terrorists in Syria with chemical weapons which were used against the Syrian people and soldiers.


Furat Alkac, a journalist who works for Turkey's Taraf newspaper, disclosed the details of the recent events in the country in which 11 people were arrested for carrying the highly poisonous Sarin gas to be used against the Syrian people.

"From among these 11 people, only Heisam Qassab from Syria was imprisoned and others were freed after short period of detention," he told FNA on Monday.

"He (Qassab) carried 2 kilograms of Sarin gas but the Ankara officials later claimed that he had been carrying deicer. Yet, after the indictment was issued, it was revealed that in addition to deicer, some amounts of white phosphorous have also been found and seized from them, and that these 11 people were seeking to find the formula for the production of Sarin gas,"Alkac said.

Alkac further pointed out that the 11 terrorists have later found more accomplices for getting information and transferring the gas, adding that all these accomplices were somehow connected to Turkey's state-run Mechanics and Chemistry Institute.

"The Turkish government should have been aware of such relations since these terrorists were under surveillance by the Turkish� intelligence service, while they were traveling across the Turkish-Syrian joint borders easily," he added.

Turkey has played a leading role in providing logistic support to the terrorists fighting the Syrian people.

Earlier this month, former Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey and a close friend of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Abdullatif Sener, criticized the Turkish government for providing heavy weapons to the organized terrorist groups in Syria, including the notorious al-Nusra Front, warning of its dangerous consequences.

"The Erdogan government has sent a large volume of heavy weapons to the terrorist group, the al-Nusra Front, affiliated to the al-Qaeda in Syria and this is while even the US has listed the al-Nusra as a terrorist group," Sener told FNA in Ankara.

"This move is highly dangerous," he warned.

Sener described Turkey's meddling in its neighbor's internal affairs as a mistake, and said, "Turning the region into a region for trading smuggled arms and supporting this trade is a wrong policy of Erdogan's government."

Earlier reports said that Ankara has sent 400 tons of arms supplied by some Persian Gulf states to militants in Syria to bolster their fight against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

"Twenty trailers crossed from Turkey and are being distributed to arms depots for several brigades across the North," said Mohammad Salam, a rebel operative who witnessed the crossing from an undisclosed location in Hatay.

The delivery is being called the single biggest weapons cache to reach the rebels since the unrest began over two years ago.

The shipment followed the recent gas attack in the suburbs of Damascus that killed anywhere from dozens to over 1,000 civilians. Syrian officials, who said they discovered chemical weapons in a rebel hideout outside the capital, blame the rebels for the attack.

The consignment - mostly ammunition for shoulder-fired weapons and anti-aircraft machine guns - came into northern Syria via the Turkish province of Hatay, and was already being handed out, sources said.

Turkey has been openly calling for regime change and military action in Syria since the country was hit by unrest in 2011 but Turkish political opposition parties have strongly rejected any military strikes on Syria.

By Fars News Agency

 

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