International monitors contradicted Russia’s claim that a western toxin may have been used in the attempted assassination of a former spy living in England, reiterating Wednesday their assessment that the poison was a chemical weapon developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“There was no other chemical that was identified by the labs,” Marc-Michael Blum, a senior chemist at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said Wednesday during a meeting at the Hague.
British Prime Minister Theresa May rocked the world of international diplomacy when she accused Russia of using “a military-grade nerve agent” to poison former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, who was granted British citizenship after working as a double agent for the United Kingdom. Russia has denied responsibility and accused the U.K. of staging the crime.
That defense culminated in Russia claiming Saturday to have learned that a Swiss laboratory tasked by the OPCW with studying samples from the Skripal poisoning had found traces of BZ, a toxin “in service in the United States, the United Kingdom and some other NATO members,” as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it.
Blum contradicted Lavrov’s claim. “The precursor of BZ that is referred to in the public statements, commonly known as 3Q, was contained in the control sample prepared by the OPCW lab in accordance with the existing quality control procedures,” Blum said. Otherwise it has nothing to do with the samples collected by the OPCW team in Salisbury.”
OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu also defended the credibility of the analysts who corroborated the United Kingdom’s claim that Skripal was felled by a toxin known as a Novichok.
“The reliability and technical capabilities of the designated laboratories have been subject to close and rigorous scrutiny over the years,” he said. “I would like to underline that the States Parties can be assured of the credibility and integrity of this network, and I am sure that the designated laboratories will continue to deliver in the same impeccable manner as they have done so to date.”
British diplomats applauded the OPCW’s rebuttal.
“What they made very clear is that they independently verified our findings that this was a nerve agent, Novichok; they also made very clear that this was of high purity,” Peter Wilson, the U.K. ambassador to the OPCW, said after the meeting. “That means that this could only have been produced in a highly sophisticated laboratory. The Russians yet again used this opportunity to discredit the OPCW and promote more false narratives.”
