- Date of Incident
- 30 Mar 2017
- Location
- Al Lataminah, Syria
- Publication Date
- 14 Apr 2019
- Commissioned By
- Bellingcat
- Additional Funding
- None
- Collaborators
- Bellingcat
- Methodologies
- 3D Modelling
- Forums
- Media
Over the space of a week, in March and April 2017, successive reports of chemical weapons attacks emerged from the Syrian towns of Khan Sheikhoun and Al Lataminah. In response to accusations that the Syrian regime was to blame, Russia’s foreign ministry held a press conference in October 2017, at which they attempted to demonstrate that their Syrian allies could not have been responsible.
During the press conference, they made reference to a previous attack in Khan Sheikhoun and showed analysis of the crater site, claiming that the attack had been staged using a ground-level munition. In another slide they showed detailed drawings of two chemical weapons used by the Syrian Arab airforce and inadvertently provided a key piece of evidence. Bomb fragments that had been documented as part of an OPCW mission in Al Lataminah could now be compared against detailed drawings.
We found that the fragments photographed and measured by the OPCW at Al Lataminah precisely matched the drawings of the M4000 bomb leaked by Russia.
Updates
Update — 24 September 2019
Bellingcat presents new findings: the first confirmed video documentation of the M4000 munition. At their request, we built a simple photogrammetric model, based on the open source video material found by Bellingcat’s researchers.
