‘Highly Protected’: OPCW confirms it buried critical evidence in Syria chemical weapons probe
The OPCW finally acknowledges concealing the assessment of German military toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of dozens of deaths in the alleged Douma chemical attack of April 2018.
By Aaron Mate
For the first time in a prolonged cover-up scandal, the world’s top chemical watchdog has acknowledged censoring a finding that undermined allegations of a toxic gas attack by the former Syrian government.
According to previously leaked documents, expert German military toxicologists consulted by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death of dozens of victims in an alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma in April 2018. The experts even raised the possibility that the incident was a false flag. The OPCW suppressed this finding and released a final report asserting that chlorine gas was likely used. The OPCW’s conclusion aligned with the claims of the US, UK, and France, who bombed Syria in April 2018 over what they alleged was a Syrian government chemical attack in Douma.
After years of stonewalling, the OPCW has admitted that the Germans’ input, along with the fact that they were even consulted, was concealed.
The concession came during a legal battle with Dr. Brendan Whelan, a veteran OPCW inspector and senior member of the team that deployed to Syria for the Douma mission. Whelan and another Douma team member, Ian Henderson, raised concerns about the manipulation of the investigation’s findings.
After their complaints became public, the OPCW leadership publicly disparaged the two dissenting inspectors and penalized them for alleged breaches of confidentiality. Whelan successfully challenged his censure before the Geneva-based Tribunal of the International Labour Organisation (ILOAT), which recently awarded him damages and instructed the OPCW to withdraw its impugned decision.
One of the allegations against Whelan was that he improperly sent two letters in March and April 2019 to Fernando Arias, the OPCW Director-General, raising concerns about unethical conduct in the Douma investigation. In trying to make its case against Whelan, the OPCW inadvertently admitted to the censorship that he had challenged. In his letters to Arias, the OPCW complained, Whelan included “specific and detailed information gathered by FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] investigators from toxicology experts. This information, classified as OPCW Highly Protected, was not included in the Final Report which was publicly released.”
The OPCW’s confirmation that it excluded the toxicologists’ “Highly Protected” information from the publicly released Final Report confirms one of Whelan’s key grievances.
“Critical information, like the expert opinions of the toxicologists... has, shockingly, been omitted,” Whelan wrote in his April 2019 letter. “There is even no record in the report of those consultations... To say that this selective use of expert opinions and facts is disturbing is an understatement.”
Whelan protested the omission of the German toxicologists’ input because of its profound implications. In public statements after the Douma incident, experts had already raised doubts that chlorine caused the deaths in Douma. But the German military toxicologists, who were consulted by the OPCW in June 2018, were more definite. The Germans told the OPCW that the circumstances of the fatalities – apparent immediate death and collapse in piles at the center of two rooms, a failure to escape, and rapid profuse foaming at the mouth and nose – were inconsistent with chlorine poisoning. According to the then-head of the OPCW Laboratory, the experts even raised “the possibility of a staged attack” in Douma because “the circumstances of death for the victims do not match chlorine.”
While the Douma victims’ signs of rapid foaming are not consistent with exposure to chlorine gas, they are consistent with nerve agent exposure. But by that point, the OPCW’s chemical analysis had ruled out a sarin or any other nerve agent bomb as the killer because none of these chemicals, or any toxic chemicals for that matter, were found at the scene or in biomedical samples.
If the rapid and profuse frothing was not the result of a nerve agent or chlorine gas attack, the possibility existed that there was no chemical attack at all – and that insurgents staged the incident to frame the Syrian government. In this case, the OPCW would be dealing with a faked chemical attack that triggered US-led airstrikes on Syria, and the unexplained deaths of more than 40 men, women, and children.
The Germans’ assessment was included in the Douma team’s initial report, which Whelan authored with the help of fellow experts and, after peer approval including the team leader, prepared for publication in June 2018. But senior OPCW officials subverted that document and tried to rush out a replacement, doctored version that falsely claimed evidence of chemical weapons use. Whelan thwarted the release of the bogus substitute only after discovering it at the last minute and sending an email of protest. But when the final report was released in March 2019, after Whelan had departed the Organisation, the OPCW again excluded any mention of the Germans’ expert opinions, or even that they had been consulted. Instead, the report claimed that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine [chlorine gas].” Had the Germans’ findings been published, they would have explicitly contradicted this conclusion.
In an August 2019 email, Whelan asked two OPCW officials who had accompanied him to Germany if they would join him in raising concerns about the suppression of the toxicologists’ findings. “At a minimum a satisfactory explanation has to be provided,” Whelan wrote. But the OPCW has never offered a rebuttal to the initial toxicology assessment, nor an explanation for why it was concealed.
Another OPCW report on the Douma incident, released in January 2023 by the organization’s Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), claimed to have consulted with a different, unidentified toxicologist and asserted that the “symptoms of the victims are, overall, consistent with exposure to chlorine gas in very high concentrations.”
But as I reported at the time, and discussed in a presentation to the United Nations, the IIT report limited the toxicologist’s scope of assessment to just the “accounts” of a cherry-picked selection of alleged witnesses. Moreover, the IIT’s toxicologist failed to address the frothing seen on dead victims in the videos in Douma, as well as the Germans’ assessment that this was inconsistent with exposure to chlorine gas. To date, no recognized toxicologist has gone on record to state that the Douma victims’ visible symptoms and reported rapid deaths are consistent with chlorine gas exposure.
In the halls of power, the IIT’s report was treated as a vindication of the chemical attack allegation in Douma, which was integral to the broader US-led regime change campaign that toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. The State Department and its British, French, and German counterparts hailed the IIT’s findings and touted what they called “the independent, unbiased, and expert work of the OPCW staff.”
Establishment media outlets followed suit. Major outlets – including the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post – approvingly covered the IIT report while omitting any mention of the OPCW’s Douma cover-up controversy. In an illustrative act of denialism, the Post ignored the dissenting inspectors and reduced skepticism of the official narrative to “a disinformation campaign by the Russian state and a number of high-profile online activists.” These voices, the Post falsely added, even claimed that “children seen foaming at the mouth were faking their symptoms.”
In reality, the fakery came from the OPCW when it erased the findings of expert German toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of those symptoms and casualties. As a direct consequence of Whelan taking legal action, the OPCW has finally admitted that it suppressed this critical information in the still-unresolved probe into how dozens of people in Douma lost their lives.
Disgusting!! When and how does it stop! Thanks so much Grayzone for your non-stop vigilance!
I interviewed a Syrian after the alleged chemical attack who told me on the air that the story was made up.