Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad on Friday blamed the country's former al-Qaida affiliate for a deadly bombing against buses carrying evacuees outside Aleppo at the weekend.
"It was Jabhat al-Nusra, they haven't hidden it from the very start, and I think that everyone agrees that it was Nusra," Assad told Russia's RIA Novosti news agency in an interview, referring to the jihadist group now known as the Fateh al-Sham Front that has supposedly severed its ties with al-Qaida.
The bombing killed 126 people, 68 of them children, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at the Rashidin transit point west of Aleppo as people were evacuating from the besieged government-held towns of Fuaa and Kafraya.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, one of the deadliest episodes since the start of Syria's six-year civil war.