MOSCOW, November 14. /TASS/. White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier may have been liquidated by intelligence agents upon the CIA’s instructions or with the agency’s direct participation, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Russia’s Rossiya-24 television on Thursday.

The Syrian president said he saw links between the death of Le Mesurier and the deaths of US financier Jeffry Epstein, Al Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden and Islamic State (outlawed in Russia) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. "American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was killed several weeks ago, they said he had committed suicide in jail. However, he was killed because he knew a lot of vital secrets connected with very important people in the British and American regimes, and possibly in other countries as well," Assad pointed out.

"And now the main founder of the White Helmets has been killed, he was an officer and he had worked his whole life with NATO in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq and Lebanon," he went on to say.

"Both of us know that they [representatives of the White Helmets] are naturally part of Al Qaeda. I believe that these people, as well as the previously liquidated bin Laden and al-Baghdadi had been killed chiefly because they knew major secrets. They turned into a burden once they had played out their roles. A dire need to do away with them surfaced after they had fulfilled their roles," Assad explained.

According to him, the death of Le Mesurier is the work of the CIA that got rid of the founder of the White Helmets independently or through the intelligence services of other countries. "Of course, this is the work of the secret services. But which secret service? When we talk about Western secret services in general, about Turkish and some other ones in our region, these are not the secret services of sovereign states, rather these are departments of the main intelligence agency - the CIA," he stressed.

"It is quite possible that Turkish intelligence agencies did the job upon the instructions of foreign intelligence services," he assumed. "Possibly, the founder of the White Helmets had been working on his memoirs and on the biography of his life, and this was unacceptable. This is an assumption, but a very serious one, since other options don’t sound convincing to me at the moment," Assad concluded.

The White Helmets organization was set up in Syria in 2014. It is notorious for its uploading to the Internet photos and videos on destruction and casualties from alleged attacks from the Syrian government and its allies. The organization has been repeatedly accused of concocting fake news and staged incidents.

Le Mesurier’s death

According to Turkey’s NTV television, the body of the 48-year-old Le Mesurier was found on Monday on an Istanbul street near his house. Police checked the nearby CCTV cameras, finding out that no strangers had entered the building overnight. The investigation’s main version at the moment is that he fell out of the window of the balcony of his apartment. CNN Turk reported that there were cuts on his face and body, and his limbs had been broken.