Soviet-era scientist says he helped create nerve agent in spy attack row
A Cold War-era scientist acknowledged Tuesday he helped create the nerve agent that Britain says was used to poison an ex-spy and his daughter, contradicting Moscow's claim that neither Russia nor the Soviet Union ever had such a programme.
However, Professor Leonid Rink told the RIA news agency that the attack did not look like Moscow's work because Sergei and Yulia Skripal had not died immediately.
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Rink told RIA he had worked at a Soviet chemicals weapons research facility in the town of Shikhany in Russia's Saratov Region for 27 years until the early 1990s. Novichok was not a single substance, he said, but a system of using chemical weapons and had been called 'Novichok-5' by the Soviet Union.
"A big group of specialists in Shikhany and in Moscow worked on Novichok - on the technologies, toxicologies and biochemistry," he said. "In the end we achieved very good results."
Rink confessed to having secretly supplied a military-grade poison for cash that was used to murder a Russian banking magnate and his secretary in 1995. In a statement to investigators after his arrest, viewed by Reuters, Rink said he was in possession of poisons created as part of the chemical weapons programme which he stored in his garage.
Rink received a one-year suspended prison sentence for "misuse of powers" after a secret trial, according to a lawyer involved in the case.
Rink told RIA it would have been absurd for Russian spies to have used Novichok to try to kill the Skripals because of its obviously Russian origin and Russian name.
"There are lots of more suitable substances," he said. "To fire the equivalent of a powerful rocket at someone who is not a threat and to miss would be the height of idiocy."
http://www.france24.com/en/20180320-soviet-scientist-novichok-nerve-agent-spy-attack-skripal-russia-britain