UN inspectors have conducted "a wide range of fact-finding activities" at a site outside the Syrian capital of Damascus, where alleged chemical weapons attacks killed hundreds of people, a UN spokesman said here Saturday.

However, there could be no report on whether banned poison gas had been used until laboratory tests are completed, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said when briefing the press on a meeting between UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Angela Kane, the UN high representative for disarmament affairs who just returned from Damascus.

Kane, who was sent to Syria to negotiate a UN probe into the alleged August 21 chemical attack, told the UN chief at the meeting on Saturday morning that "the (UN) Mission was able to conduct a wide range of fact-finding activities" in an alleged chemical attack site in the Damascus suburb, Nesirky said.

The UN inspectors have taken the samples to The Hague and will be moved to two laboratories in Europe, Nesirky said.

The spokesman vowed that the UN inspectors will conduct " impartial and credible" assessments on whether chemical weapons were used in the Syrian conflict, which has been going on for 29 months.

Ban got reassurance from Kane that "whatever can be done to speed up the process (of analyzing evidence gathered in Syria) is being done" now that the UN chemical weapons team has returned to the Netherlands, he said.

When the UN experts completed their samples study, the UN chief would share the information with UN member states and the UN Security Council, he said.

However, he refused to give a timeline about the process of samples assessment.

Ban, who cut short his European tour to be briefed on the UN investigations, also talked Saturday morning over the phone with Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish specialist who is head of the UN group of about 10 inspectors, shortly after they arrived in the Netherlands, said the spokesman.

Sellstrom would brief the secretary-general on the work of his team on Sunday, Nesirky said.

The UN fact-finding group, created by Ban in March at the request of the Syrian government, has a mandate to establish only whether chemical weapons were used, but not who used them.