AFP reports that a team of 24 experts with the UN are preparing to conduct a probe on the use of deadly gas attacks in Syria.
The goal of the investigation is to track everyone involved: perpetrators, financial backers, logisticians, and co-conspirators.
The probe is conducted through the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) of the UN Security Council, headed by Virginia Gamba. She is a disarment expert and has worked on two previous UN investigations of chemical weapons in Syria.
"Will I have the name, surname, and age of a perpetrator? I have no idea," Gamba told AFP in an interview at her new UN offices. "It's going to be very hard to do."
The UN panel will be fully-functioning by mid-November, with offices in New York, the Hague, and Damascus. they are negotioning an agreement with Syrian officials to do fieldwork, interview witnesses, and collect physical evidence.
The investigation will build on the information discovered by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that chlorine gas was most likely used on opposition-held villages in the Idlib and Hama provinces. Chlorine gas was banned for warfare use in the Geneva Protocol, and its usage is considered a war crime.
The JIM plans to take a broad scope to find those who are responsible.
"This is what the intention is: to create a very big canvas where everyone would be accountable either directly or indirectly from the very first round of accountability to the end," said Gamba to AFP.
The panel's preliminary report is expected for February 2016.
