U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday that a report on last month's deadly attack in Syria would be "overwhelming" in showing that chemical weapons were used.Ban made the statement while giving comments that he thought were not to be quoted but were broadcast on an in-house television channel at U.N. headquarters in New York.
The secretary-general was referring to a report from the U.N. chief weapons inspector, Ake Sellstrom, who announced Friday that his report would be brought to Ban over the weekend. Sellstrom didn't say when the report would be released to the public.
In unusual candor, the secretary-general said that Syrian President Bashar Assad "has committed many crimes against humanity."
The U.N. chief's deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, said that Ban was not referring to the chemical weapons attack but to reports from the Human Rights Council and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.
The secretary-general's candor shifts the balance because the U.N. has not accused Assad of war crimes during Syria's two-and-a-half-year-long civil war and the recent U.N. inspectors' mandate was to only establish if chemical weapons were used in last month's attack outside Damascus.
Ban said that Assad will be brought to justice and "there will be, surely, the process of accountability when everything is over."