Syria: Bombing kills top pro-Assad Sunni preacher

Ban said investigators would look into Syria’s allegation that rebels carried out a chemical weapons attack on Khan al-Assal village in northern Aleppo province. The rebels blamed regime forces for the attack.

A senior U.S. official, meanwhile, said the United States has strong indications that no chemical weapons were used at all. Officials won’t entirely rule out the possibility, but this official said additional intelligence-gathering has led the U.S. to believe more strongly that it was not a weaponized chemical attack. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

A suicide bombing tore through a mosque in the Syrian capital Thursday, killing a top Sunni Muslim preacher and longtime supporter of President Bashar Assad along with at least 41 other people.

The assassination of Sheikh Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Buti removes one of the few remaining pillars of support for the Alawite leader among the majority sect that has risen up against him.

The powerful explosion struck as al-Buti, an 84-year-old cleric and religious scholar who appeared often on TV, was giving a religious lesson in the Eman Mosque in the central Mazraa district of Damascus, according to state TV.

Suicide bombings blamed on Islamic extremists fighting with the rebels have become common in Syria’s 2-year-old civil war. But Thursday’s explosion marked the first time a suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside a mosque.

Syrian TV said 84 people were wounded in the explosion and showed footage of injured people and bodies with severed limbs on the blood-stained floor. Later, it showed bodies covered in white body bags lined up in rows. Sirens wailed through the capital as ambulances rushed to the scene, which was sealed off by the military.

Among those killed was al-Buti’s grandson, the TV said.

Al-Buti’s death was a big blow to Syria’s embattled leader, who is fighting mainly Sunni rebels seeking his ouster. Al-Buti has been a vocal supporter of Assad’s regime since the early days of his father and predecessor, the late President Hafez Assad. Sunnis are the majority sect in Syria while Assad is from the minority Alawite sect — an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Syrian TV began its evening newscast with a phone announcement from the religious endowments minister, Mohammad Abdelsattar al-Sayyed, declaring al-Buti’s “martyrdom” as his voice choked up. It then showed parts of his sermon last Friday in which he praised the military for battling the “mercenaries” and said Syria was being subjected to a “universal conspiracy.”

Assad’s regime refers to the rebels fighting against it as “terrorists” and “mercenaries” who are backed by foreign powers trying to destabilize the country. The war, which the U.N. says has killed more than 70,000 people, has become increasingly chaotic as rebels press closer to Assad’s seat of power in Damascus after seizing large swaths of territory in the northern and eastern parts of the country.

The rebels also captured a village and other territory on the edge of the Golan Heights on Thursday as fighting closed in on the strategic plateau that Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and later annexed, activists and officials said.

The battles near the town of Quneitra in southwest Syria sent many residents fleeing, including dozens who crossed into neighboring Lebanon. The fighting in the sensitive area began Wednesday near the cease-fire line between Syrian and Israeli troops.

One of the worst-case scenarios for Syria’s civil war is that it could draw in neighboring countries such as Israel or Lebanon.

There have already been clashes with Turkey, Syria’s neighbor to the north. And Israel recently bombed targets inside Syria said to include a weapons convoy headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon, a key ally of the regime in Damascus and an arch foe of the Jewish state.