Moscow slams French report on "Syrian chemical weapons" based on social media

Russian Foreign Ministry sharply criticized a report regarding the alleged April 7 chemical attack in Syria published by Paris in an apparent attempt to justify the recent missile strikes against the Middle Eastern country.

"The pretext for the attack, according to the statements made by US officials and the so called secret report recently published by French intelligence agencies, were mass media and social media publications," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, Sputnik reports.

She also remarked that while mass media may bear some responsibility for what they publish, the veracity of publications in social media simply cannot be confirmed; and that today the responsibility for military actions is apparently being pushed onto mass media which circulate publications that got nothing to do with reality.

"Everyone remembers how the bombing of Iraq began, when Secretary of State Colin Powell got set up with that test tube. Today, no one is foolish enough to go to the [UN] Security Council and start waving test tubes around. Instead, it were the US, British, French and European mass media in general who got appointed as such fools," Zakharova said.