Leonid Rink, who told the state media that he worked on a state-backed programme up to the early 1990s, added that the former double agent and his daughter would be dead had Moscow been involved in his poisoning.
Moscow : A Russian scientist told state media on Tuesday he worked on an official programme to produce the nerve agent Britain says was used against ex-spy Sergei Skripal, contradicting Moscow’s claims it never developed Novichok.
Leonid Rink, who told RIA Novosti he worked on a state-backed programme up to the early 1990s, added that the former double agent and his daughter would be dead had Moscow been involved in his poisoning, reports AFP.
“They are still alive. That means that either it was not the Novichok system at all, or it was badly concocted, carelessly applied,” he said in the interview.
“Or straight after the application, the English used an antidote, in which case they would have had to have known exactly what the poison was,” he said.
Rink said he worked at a state laboratory in the closed town of Shikhan for 27 years, where the development of Novichok formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation.
“A large group of specialists in Shikhan and Moscow worked on ‘Novichok’,” he said. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov last week said Moscow never had any programmes to develop the chemical weapon.
Expelled Russian envoys leave UK
London: Nearly two dozen Russian diplomats expelled by the British government in retaliation over the poisoning of a UK-based former Russian double agent and his daughter left the country on Tuesday with their families. The Russian Embassy in London confirmed that 80 people, including the 23 Russian diplomats and their families, were on their way back to Moscow, which marks the one-week deadline given by British PM Theresa May last week. May said that UK was certain that a deadly nerve agent from Novichok stock associated with Russia had been used in the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.