Syria rejects Washington's crematorium allegation as 'unfounded'

Syria has categorically rejected Washington's accusation that Damascus has constructed a prison-based crematorium to burn the bodies of thousands of alleged executed detainees, saying the "unfounded" claim is in fact a new "Hollywood" story made to further interfere in the internal affairs of the Arab country.

"As it is habitual of successive US administrations to fabricate lies and allegations to justify their aggressive and interventionist policies in other sovereign countries, what came out from the current US administration is just a new Hollywood screenplay disconnected from reality," said the Syrian Foreign Ministry in a statement carried by the official SANA news agency on Tuesday.

The ministry's response came a day after the US Department of State, citing the US intelligence community and some "credible" humanitarian agencies, accused the Syrian government of cremating the bodies of inmates killed in "extrajudicial" executions in the Saydnaya military prison, located some 30 kilometers north of the capital Damascus, in order to "cover up the extent of mass murders taking place" in the detention facility.

It also distributed a satellite photo, dated April 2017, which allegedly shows the Saydnaya complex, naming some parts of it, including a "probable crematorium."

Syria has in the past strongly denied any abuse at Saydnaya. Earlier this year, Damascus dismissed as baseless a report by Amnesty International about mass hanging at the prison.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry, while strongly condemning the accusation, further said that such allegations were "totally unfounded."

"They are nothing but the product of the imagination of this administration and its agents," it added.

The ministry also said that the new accusation was in line with previous baseless allegations that Washington leveled against the Syrian government, including Damascus' alleged use of "explosive barrels" and "chemical weapons" against the opposition in the Arab country.

In this file photo released by the US Air Force, warplanes fly over northern Iraq as part of the so-called US-led coalition's airstrikes in Syria.

The new allegation by the United States against the Syrian government came on the same day that, according to the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, US-led airstrikes in Syria’s eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr near the border with Iraq killed at least 23 displaced civilians.

On Saturday, another aerial aggression carried out by the US-led military coalition in Raqqah Province claimed the lives of 12 women.

Earlier on May 9, nearly a dozen people, including four children and six women, lost their lives and several others sustained injuries when US-led warplanes bombarded al-Salihiya village in northern Syria.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be positions of the Daesh Takfiri terrorists inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.

The US-led coalition has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying Daesh.

Syria has been fighting different foreign-sponsored militant and terrorist groups since March 2011. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimated last August that more than 400,000 people had been killed in the crisis until then.