{"id":109531,"date":"2018-04-30T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=109531"},"modified":"2018-05-07T09:54:35","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T08:54:35","slug":"an-alternative-explanation-to-the-skripal-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/04\/an-alternative-explanation-to-the-skripal-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"An Alternative Explanation to the Skripal Mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"

An alternative explanation to the mystery surrounding the poisoning of Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter may involve a possibility that neither the British nor Russian governments want to talk about.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

17 Apr 2018 – <\/em>For weeks, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary\u00a0Boris Johnson have insisted that there is \u201cno alternative explanation\u201d\u00a0to Russian government responsibility for the poisoning of former\u00a0double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last month.<\/p>\n

But in fact the British government is well aware that such an\u00a0alternative explanation does exist. It is based on the well-documented\u00a0fact that the \u201cNovichok\u201d nerve agent synthesized by Soviet scientist\u00a0in the 1980s had been sold by the scientist\u2013who led the\u00a0development of the nerve agent\u2013 to individuals linked to Russian\u00a0criminal organizations as long ago as 1994 and was used to kill a\u00a0Russian banker in 1995.<\/p>\n

The connection between the Novichok nerve agent and a previous murder\u00a0linked to the murky Russian criminal underworld would account for the\u00a0facts of the Salisbury poisoning far better than the official line\u00a0that it was a Russian government assassination attempt.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0credibility of the May government\u2019s attempt to blame it on Russian President Vladimir Putin has suffered because of Yulia Skripal\u2019s relatively rapid recovery, the apparent improvement<\/a> of Sergei Skripal\u2019s condition and a medical\u00a0specialist\u2019s statement that the Skripals had exhibited no symptoms of\u00a0nerve agent poisoning.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Vil Mirzayanov<\/p><\/div>\n

How a Crime Syndicate Got Nerve Agent<\/strong><\/p>\n

The highly independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta<\/em> has published a detailed account<\/a> of how Russian organized crime figures obtained\u00a0nerve agent in 1994 from Leonid Rink, the head of the former Soviet government laboratory that had synthesized it.<\/p>\n

The newspaper gleaned the\u00a0information about the transaction from Rink\u2019s court testimony in\u00a0the 1995 murder of prominent banker Ivan Kivelidi, the leader of the\u00a0Russian Entrepreneurs\u2019 Round Table, an organization engaged in a\u00a0conflict with a powerful group of directors of state-owned\u00a0enterprises.<\/p>\n

Rink testified that after the post-Soviet Russian economic meltdown\u00a0had begun he filled each of several ampoules with 0.25 grams\u00a0of nerve agent and stored it in his own garage. Just one such ampoule\u00a0held enough agent to kill 100 people, according to Rink, the lead scientist\u00a0in the development of the series of nerve agents called Novichok (\u201cnewcomer\u201d in Russian).<\/p>\n

Rink further admitted that he had then sold one of the ampoules in 1995 to Artur Talanov, who then lived in Latvia and was later seriously wounded in an attempted robbery of a cash van in Estonia, for less than $1,800.<\/p>\n

In 1995, some of that nerve agent was applied to Kivelidi\u2019s telephone\u00a0receiver to kill him, as the court documents in the murder case reveal.\u00a0Police found that there were links between Talanov and Vladimir\u00a0Khutsishvili, who had been a board member of Kivelidi\u2019s bank,\u00a0according to the Kivelidi murder investigation. Khutsishivili was\u00a0eventually found guilty of poisoning Kivelidi, although it was found that he hired someone else to carry out the poisoning.<\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t the only nerve agent that Rink sold to gangsters. Rink\u00a0admitted in court in 2007 that he had sold four of the vials to\u00a0someone named Ryabov, who had organized crime connections in 1994. Those\u00a0vials were said to have been seized later by Federal Security Police.<\/p>\n

But the investigation of the Kivelidi murder found that vials\u00a0had also fallen into the hands of other criminal syndicates, including one\u00a0Chechen organization. Furthermore, Rink testified that he had given\u00a0each of the recipients of the nerve agent detailed instructions on how\u00a0it worked and how to handle it safely.<\/p>\n

The Mystery of the Non-Lethal Nerve Agent<\/strong><\/p>\n

The newly-revealed story of how organized crime got control of\u00a0hundreds of doses of lethal nerve agent from a government laboratory\u00a0sheds crucial light on the mystery of the poisoning in Salisbury,\u00a0especially in light of the timeline of the Skripals on the day of the\u00a0poisoning and their unexpectedly swift recovery.<\/p>\n

Reports of their\u00a0activities on\u00a0March 4\u00a0show that they were strolling in central\u00a0Salisbury, dining, and visiting a pub for several hours before collapsing\u00a0on a park bench sometime after\u00a04 pm.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Yulia Skripal from her Facebook page.<\/p><\/div>\n

The announcements of Yulia\u2019s rapid recovery on March 28 and that\u00a0Sergei was now \u201cstable\u201d and \u201cimproving rapidly\u201d about a week later\u00a0appears to be in contradiction with the British insistence that they
\nwere poisoned by a Russian government intelligence team. The\u00a0Novichok-type nerve agent has been characterized as quick acting and\u00a0highly lethal.<\/p>\n

But the official Russian forensic investigation in\u00a0conjunction with the Kivelidi\u2019s murder, as reported by Novaya Gazeta<\/em>,\u00a0concluded that the Novichok did not take effect instantaneously but\u00a0generally took from one and a half to five hours.<\/p>\n

The Russian government has now made an official issue of the fact that the nerve agent used in the poisoning proved not to be lethal. In his news conference on April 14<\/a> Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Swiss Spiez Laboratory, working on the case for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), had found traces in the Skripals\u2019 bloodsample, of the nerve agent BZ, which was never developed by Soviet scientists but was in the arsenals of the United States and Britain.<\/p>\n

Lavrov also acknowledged that the lab had in addition found traces of \u201cA-234\u201d\u2013one of the nerve agents in the Novichok series \u2013 \u201cin its initial state and in high concentration\u201d. Lavrov argued that had the assassins\u00a0used A-234 nerve agent, which he noted is at least eight times more\u00a0deadly than VX nerve gas, it \u201cwould have killed the Skripals.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if the poisoning had been done with some of the A-234 nerve agent that was sold by Rink to organized crime figures, it probably would not have been that lethal.<\/p>\n

Vil Mirzayanov, the counter-intelligence specialist on the team that\u00a0developed Novichok and who later revealed the existence of the\u00a0Novichok program, explained in an interview<\/a> with The Guardian<\/em> that the agent lost its effectiveness. \u201cThe final product, in storage, after one year is already losing 2%, 3%,\u201d Mirzayanov said, \u201cThe next year more, and the next year more. In 10-15 years, it\u2019s no longer effective.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exposure to even a large dose of such a normally lethal poison more\u00a0than 25 years after it was first produced could account for the apparent lack of normal symptoms associated with exposure to that kind of nerve agent experienced by the Skripals, as well as for their relatively speedy\u00a0recovery. That lends further credibility to a possible explanation\u00a0that someone with a personal grudge against Sergei Skripal carried out the poisoning.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Davies: Letter to The Times<\/p><\/div>\n

An Absence of Nerve Agent Symptoms?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Also challenging the official British line is a statement by a medical\u00a0specialist involved in the Salisbury District Hospital\u2019s care for the\u00a0Skripals revealing that they had not exhibited any symptoms of nerve\u00a0agent poisoning.<\/p>\n

Stephen Davies, a consultant on emergency medicine for the Salisbury\u00a0NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the Salisbury District Hospital,\u00a0wrote a letter <\/a>published in The Times<\/em> on\u00a0March 16\u00a0that presented a\u00a0problem for the official British government position. Davies wrote,\u201c[M]ay I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of\u00a0nerve-agent poisoning in Salisbury, and there have only ever been\u00a0three patients with significant poisoning.\u201d Obviously, Sergei and\u00a0Yulia Skripal were \u201cpatients\u201d in the hospital and were thus included in that statement.<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em> made the unusual decision to cover the Davies letter in a\u00a0news story, but tellingly failed to quote the crucial statement in the\u00a0letter that \u201cno patients have experienced symptoms of nerve-agent\u00a0poisoning in Salisbury\u201d or to report on the significance of the\u00a0statement.<\/p>\n

To rule out the possibility that Davies intended to say something\u00a0quite different, this writer requested a confirmation or denial of\u00a0what Davies had written in his letter from the press officer for the\u00a0Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, Patrick Butler. But Butler did not\u00a0respond for a week and then refused directly to deny, confirm or\u00a0explain the Davies statement.<\/p>\n

Instead Butler said in an email, \u201cThree people were admitted and\u00a0treated as inpatients at Salisbury District Hospital for the effects\u00a0of nerve agent poisoning as Stephen Davies wrote.\u201d When he was\u00a0reminded that the letter had actually said something quite different, Butler simply\u00a0repeated the statement he had just sent and then added, \u201cThe Trust\u00a0will not be providing any further information on this matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Butler did not respond to two separate requests from the writer for\u00a0assistance in contacting Davies. The refusal of the NHS Foundation Trust to engage at all on the subject underlines the sensitivity of the British government about nerve agent that didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

There are many individuals in Russia whose feelings about Sergei\u00a0Skripal\u2019s having become a double agent for Britain\u2019s MI6 \u2013 including\u00a0former colleagues of his \u2013 could provide a personal motive for the poisoning.\u00a0And it is certainly plausible that those individuals could have had obtained some of the nerve agent sold by Leonid Rink that entered the black market.<\/p>\n

Neither the British government nor the Russian government is apparently eager to acknowledge that alternative explanation. The British don\u2019t want it discussed, because they are determined to use the Salisbury poisoning to push their anti-Russian agenda; and the Russians may be reluctant to talk about it, because it would inevitably get into details of a secret nerve agent research project that they have claimed they closed down in 1992, despite Rink\u2019s testimony in the court case that he was still doing some work for the Russian military until 1994.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including\u00a0<\/em>Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare\u00a0(Just World Books, 2014).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An alternative explanation to the mystery surrounding the poisoning of Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter may involve a possibility that neither the British nor Russian governments want to talk about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":109535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brics","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}