The following text is the English translation of a news article found on this link from Ad-Diyar Lebanese newspaper, to be used as evidence on the discussion page here
A Jordanian officer working with the UN observers’ team in Syria said that his team has undisclosed “espionage” missions, and that these are only known for few members of the team, specifically the “westerners” and of course the Norwegian team head General Robert Mood. This Jordanian officer revealed that the team members who visited Tartus port yesterday wanted to obtain information about “foreign military activities” in one of its docks!
The team’s visit to the port astonished and raised concerns of concerned authorities, as the observers’ mission was limited to monitoring “cease-fire” violations, which was shown in “Kofi Anan’s plan” in the locations that have tensions between the Syrian army and security forces and militants on the other hand. Worthy to mention is that the whole Tatrus area and the port of course did not have any clashes or tensions of that sort!
The Jordanian officer revealed that General Mood asked the team after leaving Damascus to go to Tartus port and check the locations allocated for storing containers, with focus on the north dock in the port, as it is the “quay used by the Syrian army to import arms from abroad, either from Russia or Iran”, based on the information General Robert Mood received from his own private sources. The officer said “Mood received information the day before from western sources that Russian Special forces are in the port with their arms and equipments two days ago under the pretext of being the mechanical marine location used by Russia for providing technical and logistic services for its naval ships when they sail in the Mediterranean.” However, the observers after more than one hour roaming the port did not see anything abnormal, the officer said.
In this regard, the officer linked this information to the bombing that targeted three minibuses in Qudsaya suburb yesterday morning, the officer said “the information available for the observers’ team indicate that the Muslim Brotherhood is responsible for the bombing, and they believe that the three buses were carrying military personnel and experts from Russia who have arrived at Syria recently, but it was revealed that all victims were Syrians.” The officer revealed that three buses were targeted in the same street in Qudsaya, not one bus only as the official media announced, but the other two were relatively far from the first, which saved them from the explosion.” The bombing, which was done by a suicide bomber driving a car bomb near a commercial secondary school, killed many among them civilians and children who were with their parents and were crossing the street when the bombing happened.
Similarly, the officer revealed that he knew of at least four visits observers conducted in locations in several governorates, particularly Daraa, Idlib, and Homs, the main purpose of these was to obtain “information related to military sites for Syrian air forces and air defence forces.” The officer said that there were various visits conducted by the team to Daraa since last April, where they during one of these visits took photos of an aerial reconnaissance station in “Al-Harra” region, and during another visit they took photos of a military base located between “Nawa” and “Al Sheikh Miskin.”