Syria rejects UN report on 'child torture'
Source: Aljazeera
The Syrian ambassador to the United Nations has condemned a UN report that said his country's forces are guilty of committing violence against children caught up in the 18-month uprising. Ambassador Bashar Jaafari on Wednesday called the allegations made in the UNICEF report hostile propaganda, and said armed groups were violating the rights of children, not the government.
"We would also have preferred for the Special Representative for the Secretary General to include in the paragraphs addressing the Syrian Arab Republic the acts that have been perpetrated by armed terrorist groups that have been sustained and financed by foreign parties," Jaafari said.
In a separate development, Iraq denied a Western intelligence report saying Iran has been using civilian aircraft to fly military personnel and large quantities of weapons across Iraqi airspace to Syria to aid Assad.
"The official spokesman of the Iraqi government has denied that issue altogether ... There is nothing like this happening," Lieutenant-General Hussein Kamal, Iraq's deputy interior minister for intelligence, said on Thursday. Details of the report, which said arms transfers were organised by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, were reported by the Reuters news agency on Wednesday.
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/09/20129208224414167.html
There is a video report from Aljazeera at the link.
