The Hague — Syria came under pressure Monday to fill in gaps in its declaration to the world’s chemical weapons watchdog amid reports of toxic arms use during its six-year civil war, triggering angry Syrian denials. A fact-finding mission from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has issued three reports showing the use of chemicals weapons in the country in recent years, OPCW chief Ahmet Uzumcu said. “It’s very disturbing that yet again we are confronted with the use of chemical weapons,”Uzumcu told the annual conference of countries belonging to the Chemical Weapons Convention. It was “vital... that the long-held international norm against chemical weapons remains strong and the perpetrators are held accountable,”Uzumcu said. The 1993 arms treaty binds all member states to help rid the world of chemical weapons. Syria under President Bashar Al-Assad finally joined in 2013, admitting under US-Russian pressure to having a toxic arms stockpile, and thus staving off threatened US air strikes. Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad hit back at what he said were “false accusations”of the regime’s alleged involvement in attacks, saying the “politicized findings”of the OPCW fact-finding mission aimed to “smear the image of Syria”and destabilize his country. He insisted that 100 percent of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile had been destroyed by the OPCW. He insisted the fact-finding team should carry out a new investigation. The debate in The Hague came on the eve of fresh talks in Geneva with the United Nations aiming to revitalize flagging efforts to end the six-year conflict in which more than 340,000 people have been killed. A joint UN-OPCW body, the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), in its latest report blamed the Syrian air force for a sarin gas attack on the opposition-held village of Khan Sheikhun in April that left scores dead. Speaking on behalf of the European Union, Estonia’s representative for non-proliferation, Jacek Bylica, said EU countries were “appalled by the recurring systematic use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Syrian government and by (the Daesh group) ISIL. “There can be no impunity and those responsible for such acts must be held accountable,”he said, calling on Damascus to work with the OPCW to complete an accurate picture of its chemical weapons stockpile. The OPCW has declared that 100 percent of the Syrian regime’s stocks have been destroyed, but has increasingly voiced concerns that not everything was declared. Meanwhile, renewed Syrian army bombardment of rebel-held Eastern Ghouta outside Damascus on Monday killed 14 people, despite a ceasefire deal for the region, a monitor said. Eastern Ghouta, one of the last remaining opposition strongholds in Syria, is among four so-called “de-escalation zones”set up earlier this year under a deal agreed by regime allies Russia and Iran, and rebel supporter Turkey. But despite the deal, violence has spiralled in the area in recent days. On Monday, air strikes and artillery fire on several parts of Eastern Ghouta killed at least 14 civilians, the Britain-based monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The deaths come a day after at least 23 civilians were killed in the region in regime air strikes and artillery fire, among them four children. The Observatory says regime bombardment of Eastern Ghouta has killed more than 100 people in the past two weeks. Rebels have also fired from the area into Damascus in deadly attacks of a kind rarely seen in the capital. Eastern Ghouta is already in the grip of a humanitarian crisis caused by a crushing regime siege of the area since 2013 that has caused severe food and medical shortages. Humanitarian access to Eastern Ghouta has remained limited despite the implementation of the ceasefire zone, and a United Nations official has named the region as the “epicenter of suffering”in Syria. More than 340,000 people have been killed in Syria since its conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests. — AFP