U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has named Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom to head the U.N. investigation into allegations that chemical weapons were used in Syria, Ban's spokesman said on Tuesday.
"He is an accomplished scientist with a solid background in disarmament and international security," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.
Sellstrom was a chief inspector for UNSCOM, the U.N. inspection team that investigated and dismantled Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs in the 1990s.
He also worked with UNMOVIC, the U.N. group that returned to Iraq in 2002 and found no solid evidence Baghdad had revived its banned arms programs before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded in the Syrian
capital of Damascus, killing and wounding several people, state
television said.
Syria TV said the blast was set
off by a suicide car bomber in the northeastern district of Rukn al-Din, but
opposition activists in the area said it was not yet clear if the attack was a
bomb or mortar shell.
Neither side offered a death toll
from the blast.
Earlier on Tuesday, the NATO said it
had no intention of intervening militarily in Syria after a Syrian opposition
leader said the United States should use Patriot missiles to protect rebel-held
areas from President Bashar al-Assad's airpower.
"NATO has no intention to intervene militarily in Syria," a NATO
official said after opposition leader Moaz Alkhatib said he had asked U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry for U.S. forces to help defend rebel-controlled
northern parts of Syria with Patriots.
Three NATO countries have sent Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries to
Turkey to protect its cities from possible attack from Syria.
This as the Syrian regime forces recaptured
the shattered Baba Amr district in central Homs, an opposition monitoring group
said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said pro-government forces regained the
district, left largely uninhabitable by fierce campaigns of rocket fire and air
raids, after more than two weeks of fighting off a surprise push by rebels to
retake their former bastion.
Homs, and particularly Baba Amr, was the epicenter of the armed rebellion
against four decades of Assad rule. The two-year uprising, which began as
peaceful protests, has since spiraled into a full scale civil war across the
country.
The city, 140 km (88 miles) north of Damascus, lies on a road juncture linking
army bases on the Mediterranean coast and government forces in the capital
Damascus.
Rebels punched through army lines in the north and west of Homs in early March
to loosen a months-long military siege on their strongholds in the center of
the Syria's third biggest city.
Baba Amr had been in army hands for a year after they crushed rebel forces who
had ensconced themselves in the impoverished district.
The British-based Observatory, which has a network of activists across Syria,
said residents returned to their neighborhood to find nearly all the homes
destroyed by heavy shelling.
Arab Summit:
The emir of Qatar urged the UN
Security Council on Tuesday to end the killing in Syria's two-year-old civil
war and hold those responsible to account before international courts.
The emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
al-Thani, was speaking at the opening of an Arab summit in Doha, the capital of
the Gulf Arab state.
For his part, Syria opposition leader Al-Khatib
said that the Syrian regime bears the responsibility for refusing a solution to
the ongoing crisis, expressing gratitude towards several
Arab countries, including Lebanon, for supporting the Syrian people.
Al-Khatib noted that the US needs
to play bigger role in solving the crisis, adding that he has asked the US to protect rebel-held
north using patriot missiles.
REUTERS/LBCI
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