On Monday, journalists toured an agricultural center at the Syrian government’s invitation to prove what Ahmed Mehdi, a director of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands maintains -- no nuclear weapons program or Israeli attacks occurred there, according to a report in the LA Times.
"The allegations are completely groundless, and I don’t really understand where all this W.M.D. talk came from,” Mehdi said, referring to weapons of mass destruction.
“There was no raid here — we heard nothing," he added.
The raid Mehdi referred to was the Israeli air attack on Sept. 6 that reportedly hit a nuclear-related facility that North Korea was helping to equip.
In Deir Ez Zor, Syria, the foreign reporters perused the rows of corn and the groves of date palms.
“You see — around us are farmers, corn, produce, nothing else,” said Mehdi as he led two of the journalists around the facilities.
Earlier, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in a BBC interview, said that Israeli jets took aim at empty military buildings, but he did not give a specific location. His statement differed from the initial Syrian claim that it had repulsed the air raid before an attack occurred.
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