Cem Genco/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images(LONDON) — The death toll from a chemical weapons attack on a Syrian town Tuesday has risen to at least 72 civilians, including 20 children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
On Wednesday, Russia blamed Syrian rebels for the attack — saying that the Syrian Air Force struck a warehouse where opposition militants were storing chemical weapons — a statement that contradicts testimonies from doctors, residents and White Helmets on the ground.
“The place that was hit was filled with civilians. It was a residential area, not a military warehouse,” Abdullah al-Hussein, a Syria Civil Defense volunteer at the scene, told ABC News in a voice recording in Arabic on Wednesday.
“Yesterday evening we found a whole family in a shelter killed from choking on gas and today we found another family in a shelter that had also choked to death. We are finding whole families killed,” al-Hussein said.
On Wednesday, warplanes targeted the town of Khan Sheikhoun again, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the White Helmets.
Abdulhai Tennari, a lung doctor in Idlib, told ABC News in a Skype interview that he treated 22 patients, including around eight children, after Tuesday’s attack. His hospital is located about 40 miles away from Khan Sheikhoun.
“Many parents were looking for their children,” he said. “They don’t know what happened with them because patients were distributed to many hospitals. Many people died, parents died, so because of this there were many children without families and nobody knew who they were.”
Tennari and other medics told ABC News that more than 500 people were injured in the attack that they said involved Sarin gas. Many patients died immediately, Tennari said.
“They had difficulty breathing and secretions in their lungs and very constricted pupils,” he explained. “The patients improved after we gave them the antidote. For this reason, we believe that it was Sarin.”
Syria’s military denied on Tuesday that it used chemical weapons against civilians, saying it is too “honorable” to carry out such “heinous” crimes.
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