Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with an incapacitating toxin known as 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate or BZ, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, citing the results of the examination conducted by a Swiss chemical lab that worked with the samples that London handed over to the Organisation for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
The Swiss center sent the results to the OPCW. However, the UN chemical watchdog limited itself only to confirming the formula of the substance used to poison the Skripals in its final report without mentioning anything about the other facts presented in the Swiss document, the Russian foreign minister added. He went on to say that Moscow would ask the OPCW about its decision to not include any other information provided by the Swiss in its report.
The Swiss center mentioned by Lavrov is the Spiez Laboratory controlled by the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection and ultimately by the country’s defense minister. The lab is also an internationally recognized center of excellence in the field of the nuclear, biological, and chemical protection and is one of the five centers permanently authorized by the OPCW.
As the claims made in this article are pretty strong and were put forward by none other than the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, I decided to find out whether other sources had reported this information. Although I did not find many articles (but remember that it was Saturday evening), I came across two interesting news releases from the Russian news agency TASS, one which I am going to quote in full just below, as well as an article published on Sputniknews.com, another Russian news outlet, and entitled ‘BZ Substance Possessed by UK, US, Allegedly Used in Salisbury - Lavrov’:
MOSCOW, April 14. /TASS/.
An independent analysis of the chemical used in the Salisbury incident has uncovered traces of the chemical weapons that were in operational service in the United States, the United Kingdom and some other NATO members, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Saturday at the annual Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.
"That laboratory, where, I am convinced, professional scientists work, who value their reputation, made the following conclusions. Now I am going to cite the document. The analysis of the samples uncovered traces of the toxic chemical BZ and its precursors falling into the second category of chemical weapons under the Chemical Weapons Convention," Lavrov explained.
"The abovementioned ‘formulas’ have been in service in the United States, the United Kingdom and some other NATO members," he went on citing the report. "Neither the Soviet Union nor Russia has ever developed or stockpiled similar chemical weapons.
"It has come to our attention that, according data from the Swiss center for radiology and bacteriological analysis in Spiez, that has been received confidentially, the experts of the center on May 27 concluded the research of the samples received from the OPCW, which were selected by the OPCW at the site of poisoning in Salisbury," Lavrov said.
The claims made there were even more remarkable than those published on RT.com, so on Sunday I turned again to my favourite search engines (Startpage.com, Yandex.com, Bing.com) to find more articles as well as look up information on that laboratory in Spiez (a small town beautifully located on the south shore of Lake Thun in the canton of Berne, Switzerland). The Swiss laboratory involved in the testing, which goes by the name of Spiez Lab in English and is placed under the auspices of the Federal Office for Civil Protection, FOCP (in German, Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz, BABS), has its own website: www.labor-spiez.ch. In the news section in German, there was (on Sunday) a short paragraph in relation to the Salisbury poisoning (but available only in German):
Novitschok in Salisbury
In der Krise um den Giftanschlag von Salisbury greift Moskau die Glaubwürdigkeit des britischen Befunds an. Der Fachbereich Chemie des Labor Spiez hat jedoch keine Zweifel daran, dass die Briten den eingesetzten Kampfstoff richtig identifizierten und es sich um den Nervenkampfstoff Nowitschok handelt.
https://www.labor-spiez.ch/de/akt/index.htm
Which translates as (according to www.deepl.com/translator, the online translator recommended by a member of the Spiez Lab entitled to post comments on that lab's Twitter page — see further down, just before the links to the articles I have provided):
Novitschok in Salisbury
In the crisis surrounding the poison attack in Salisbury, Moscow is attacking the credibility of the British findings. However, the Chemistry Department of the Spiez Laboratory has no doubt that the British correctly identified the warfare agent used and that it is the nerve agent Novichok.
The lab's twitter page (https://twitter.com/search?q=SpiezLab) yielded some interesting comments from the public, with several calls for more transparency, given the extremely dangerous geopolitical tensions the Salisbury poisoning of the Skripals and the recent chemical attack and subsequent US, British and French bombings in Syria have created between the main Nato members and Russia, in particular the following comment, posted roughly mid-morning on Sunday by an anonymous commentator under the pseudonym of 4Seasons Pix:
I believe that it is a little too easy to dismiss such a comment as a mere tweet posted by a ‘Putin troll’ [it is interesting to note that those in the opposite camp are never demonised as being ‘White House trolls’ or ‘10 Downing St trolls’], as the person who refers to himself as ‘André’ did just two tweets below (in the above screenshot).
Later on in the day, I found more websites that had relayed Mr Lavrov's claim: ‘Independent Swiss Lab Says 'BZ Toxin' Used In Skripal Poisoning; US/UK-Produced, Not Russian’ (ZeroHedge, an alternative news outlet generally more concerned with the stock markets but which prides itself in also providing ‘analysis uninhibited by political constraint’), an article subsequently reproduced on Southfront.org (a pro-Russian outlet with a slant on the geopolitical and military contexts), as well as a very short article published on Réseau Voltaire (which sees itself as opposing ‘US imperialism, Zionism and French neo-colonialism’): ‘Swiss Experts Identify the Substance used on the Skripal’ (a translation of ‘Les experts suisses identifient le poison des Skripal’).
Based on the few websites I found with anything about the very serious allegations made by Russia's Foreign Minister (as at Sunday afternoon CET*), I would have been tempted to dismiss them (both the allegations and some of the websites circulating the story) had I not harboured myself serious doubts about the quality of our media in the so-called West (I can well remember how many major newspapers were in favour of both the war against Iraq in 2003 and the war against Colonel Gaddafi and his regime in Libya in 2011, and how some even misled their readers into condoning such military interventions) and had I not read the article which the lab refers its visitors to (on its Twitter page) in connection with their requests for more information («Kein Zweifel am Nowitschok-Resultat»), and in particular this paragraph:
Das unterscheidet diesen Fall von jenem in Syrien: Dort konnte aufgrund von Verunreinigungen in den untersuchten Kampfstoffen und mithilfe von Vergleichsproben festgestellt werden, dass das in Khan Sheikhun eingesetzte Sarin höchstwahrscheinlich aus syrischen Armeebeständen stammte.
That distinguishes this case [the Salisbury poisoning, more specifically the question of whether the place of origin — i.e. the country — of the chemical agent used could be determined] from that in Syria: There, due to contamination in the investigated warfare agents and with the help of comparative samples, it could be determined that the sarin used in Khan Sheikhun most likely originated from Syrian army stocks.
[Translation provided by www.deepl.com/translator, as suggested by the lab itself.]
Wars, and the events that lead to them, usually go hand in hand with dealings which are absolutely shameful to the goodness inherent in most human beings. As I know about the USS Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbour, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the baby incubators in Kuwait City, I believe that anything is possible in the run-up to a war. I simply hope — and pray — that we are not in such a situation right now.
*
The links I found on Monday evening are indicated in red;
I suppose they had not yet been
indexed when I looked again for such articles early yesterday
afternoon.
Links (with links to most of the versions of the articles archived on either the Internet Archive or Archive.is)
Lavrov: Swiss lab says ‘BZ toxin’ used in Salisbury, not produced in Russia, was in US & UK serviceLavrov: Impartial
study finds NATO chemical weapons traces in toxin used on Skripals
April 14, 19:23
http://tass.com/politics/999831
http://archive.is/LXQP3
https://web.archive.org/web/20180415051941/http://tass.com/politics/999831
Whose sarin?
Seymour M. Hersh
8 December 2013
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
