THE UN Security Council last night held an emergency meeting in New York after reports that government forces in Syria had launched a chemical weapons attack, killing up to 1300 people.
Syria's opposition said that rockets were fired over rebel-held Damascus suburbs in the middle of the night, releasing deadly fumes and killing men, women and children as they slept.
The government of President Bashar al-Assad denied using chemical weapons.
The Security Council, where Russia has vetoed previous Western efforts to impose UN penalties on Assad, began a closed-door meeting but is not expected to take decisive action, with the big powers still at loggerheads and cautiously seeking clarity over the incident.
Images, including some by freelance photographers supplied to Reuters, showed scores of bodies - some of them small children - laid on the floor of a clinic with no visible signs of injuries. Some showed people with foam around their mouths. Reuters was not able to verify the cause of their deaths.
The United States and others said it had no independent confirmation that chemical weapons had been used.
Opposition activists cited death tolls ranging from about 500 to, by one account, some 1300 after shells and rockets fell around 3am.
One man who said he had retrieved victims in the suburb of Erbin told Reuters: "We would go into a house and everything was in its place. Every person was in their place. They were lying where they had been. They looked like they were asleep. But they were dead."
When shelling hit her town of Mouadamiya, southwest of the capital, Farah al-Shami ignored rumours on Facebook that rockets were loaded with chemical agents. She thought her district was too close to a military encampment to be affected.
"And at the same time the UN was here. It seemed impossible. But then I started to feel dizzy. I was choking and my eyes were burning," the 23-year-old told Reuters over Skype.
"I rushed to the field clinic nearby. Luckily no-one in my family was hurt, but I saw entire families on the floor."
If confirmed, it would be the biggest chemical weapons attack since thousands of Iraqi Kurds were gassed by Saddam Hussein's forces at Halabja in 1988.
Doctors interviewed described symptoms they believe point to sarin gas, one of the agents Western powers accuse Damascus of having in an undeclared chemical weapons stockpile.
In Britain, Foreign Secretary William Hague said he hoped it would "wake up" supporters of Assad's regime to "realise its murderous and barbaric nature".
UN chemical weapons inspectors arrived in the Syrian capital only this week and Mr Hague said that they should be allowed immediate access to the site of an alleged deadly chemical weapons attack.
He added: "We hope the UN team in Damascus will be given immediate and unrestricted access to this area to try and establish the truth. There is no reason not to be given access when (the site) is not so many miles from where they are doing work now."
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that "if the Syrian government has nothing to hide", it would facilitate the work of the UN inspectors.
Syrian Information Minister Omran Zoabi said the allegations were "illogical and fabricated". Assad's officials have said they would never use poison gas against Syrians.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article