“We denied the incident… we avoided responding to certain questions, such as ‘where were the dead taken?’,” he said, and tried to blame cases of suffocation on “the dust, the dirt and the smoke from the fighting”.
Nisrin, seen in the video helping a girl in extreme distress, said the authorities “told us that no chemical attack happened” and that they “wanted to end this story and deny it so that Douma could turn a new page”.
The OPCW watchdog said an “elite” Syrian unit known as the Tiger Force had launched the attack during a military offensive to reclaim Douma, and that Islamist rebels had agreed to withdraw the day afterwards.
All three medical personnel said that after the first round of questioning, they were told to repeat their responses in front of a camera as testimony for an investigating committee working with the OPCW.
The footage was “edited and some passages where deleted or taken out of context to serve the point of view” of the authorities, Hanash said, and broadcast on state television the following day.
The trio found themselves turned into false witnesses for the very government whose overthrow they had hoped for.
Joy ‘incomplete’
On April 14, the trio — among 11 members of the medical personnel who were not allowed to return to Douma — were told an OPCW fact-finding mission would interview them at a Damascus hotel.
But hopes of telling the true story were dashed when authorities put recorders in their pockets or ordered them to record the interview on their phones.
“They forced us to repeat the story that they wanted,” Hanash said.
