Meanwhile, the U.N. press office announced last night that samples taken by the U.N. chemical weapons inspectors at the site of the Aug. 21 alleged chemical attack in Syria were shipped from The Hague to European labs for analysis. According to U.N. officials, the labs are in Sweden and Finland. It's not clear how long the analysis will take.
Ban will brief reporters at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Monday about Syria. And at 3:00 pm U.N. disarmament chief Angela Kane, who returned to NY from Syria over the weekend, will brief the 37 countries that signed a British letter to Ban request an urgent U.N. investigation into the Aug. 21 incident. (Those 37 countries are mostly Western and Arab states.)
Over the weekend Ban said repeatedly that he wanted chief chemical investigator Ake Sellstrom to expedite his investigation of the Aug. 21 incident as much as possible without jeopardizing the integrity of his results. It's still unclear how long it will take before Sellstrom is able to submit a report to Ban. Last week Ban told the P5 that it could take up to two weeks before the U.N. can say with certainty whether or not chemical weapons were used on Aug. 21 in an attack on suburbs of Damascus that the U.S. says killed over 1,400 people, many of them children.
Of course, the U.N. investigation won't say who launched any chemical weapons, only whether such toxins were used...
