International
Russia hints that US, UK could have equally poisoned Skripal and his daughter
Russia‘s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is shifting the blame of the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter after claiming that the nerve agent used on the Skripal’s could be in the arsenal of the US and UK.
Lavrov further said that Skripal’s may have been poisoned by a substance which could have been the BZ substance – which was never produced in the Soviet Union or Russia.
Citing a report from a Swiss lab dated March 27, Lavrov said the evidence suggested the nerve agent used could have been administered on Skripal by the United States or Britain.
Read also: RUSSIA MEDDLING: Trump less likely to sit for Mueller interview, sources say
“This formulation was in the inventory of the United States, Britain and other NATO states,” Lavrov said, at an assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy.
Meanwhile, British national security adviser Mark Sedwill has revealed that Russian intelligence agencies had been spying on Skripal and his daughter for the past five years.
Sedwill asserted that much in a letter that he addressed to NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, explaining Britain’s conclusion that the Russian government is to blame for the military-grade nerve agent used against Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.
In the letter, Sedwill said only Russia had the “technical means, operational experience and the motive” for the attack.
Skripal, 66, a former colonel in Russia’s military intelligence who betrayed dozens of agents to Britain’s MI6 foreign spy service, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found unconscious on a bench in the cathedral city of Salisbury on March 4.
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