A FRENCH judge will lead investigations into war crimes in Syria, the United Nations said on Monday night.

Secretary-general Antonio Guterres has appointed Catherine Marchi-Uhel to head the new “International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism” for Syria, said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

The UN general assembly voted last December — over the objections of Syria’s government and its ally Russia — to establish the body “to closely co-ordinate” with the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

Ms Marchi-Uhel previously served as a judge with the UN mission in Kosovo and was a senior legal officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Her appointment comes as the UN is set to apportion blame for the alleged April 4 chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province.

The UN’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said last Thursday that the sarin nerve agent had been found on samples — though these were provided by al-Qaida-affiliated militants occupying the town.

That claim was immediately seized upon by the US and Britain to justify their earlier allegations that Syrian jets had dropped nerve gas on civilians, prompting the US to respond with a massive but ineffective cruise missile strike.

France — the colonial power in Syria from 1920 to 1946 — also claimed in late April to have proof that Syria was responsible for the Khan Sheikhoun attack.

But on Monday, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad disputed the OPCW report, pointing out that investigators had refused invitations to visit Khan Sheikhoun or the Shayrat airfield, from where the US claimed the attack was launched.

“The United States did not allow them to go there to avoid a revelation,” he said.

Yesterday, Syria’s official Sana news agency reported that the US-led coalition had killed nine civilians in an air raid on the village of Ziyanat, south of Shadadi in eastern Hassakeh province.

Meanwhile, the coalition said its Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) allies — dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia — had entered the old quarter of Raqqa after an air strike demolished two 25-yard sections of the eighth-century city walls.

Coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon was anxious to avoid parallels with the Isis death cult’s destruction of Palmyra’s Roman ruins or the Grand Mosque of al-Nuri in the Iraqi city of Mosul.