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Project July 7, 2021

Was a Syrian Voltaren Manufacturer Acting as a Front for Bashar's Nerve Agent?

Authors:

The investigative unit of the Swiss media group Tamedia already has published two news stories regarding the sale of 5.2 tons of isopropanol from the German company Brenntag to a Syrian company with very close ties to the regime.

In collaboration with the Suddeustche Zeizung, they plan to dig further. Antoine Harari and Kurt Pelda are aiming to prove that the chemicals were used for military purposes and to show that the story of the production of Voltaren, an anti-inflammatory drug, was only a cover-up. They also hope to demonstrate that Brenntag circumvented the European Union sanctions that were in place in 2014.

In order to do so, they plan to map the journey made by those chemicals from their starting point in Brenntag's Basel warehouse to the Mediterranean Pharmaceutical Industries facility, 18 kilometers away from Damascus. They hope that this will allow them to show that the only reason for those chemicals to have been sent from Switzerland was to circumvent the European Union sanctions.

This research will be made possible by using the data collected from Swiss and German customs as well as the information they are currently collecting via the boat mapping system Winward.

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