Soviet-era scientist says he helped create poison in UK spy attack row

MOSCOW: A Cold War-era scientist acknowledged on Tuesday he had helped create the nerve agent that Britain says was used to poison an ex-spy and his daughter, contradicting Moscow´s insistence 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.The Skripals remain alive but in critical condition more than three weeks after they were found unconscious in the English cathedral town of Salisbury.

A policeman who helped them is also in hospital in a serious condition.Rink said he worked under the Soviet Union at a chemical weapons facility where the Novichok military-grade nerve agent was developed.

Asked if he was one of Novichok´s creators, he told RIA: “Yes.It was the basis for my doctoral dissertation.“Moscow has denied any involvement in the Skripals´ case or that the Soviet Union or its successor state Russia developed Novichok at all.

Echoing a theory floated in Russian state media, Rink said the British could have been behind the attack.“It´s hard to believe that the Russians were involved, given that all of those caught up in the incident are still alive,” he said. “Such outrageous incompetence by the alleged (Russian) spies would have simply been laughable and unacceptable.

“Inspectors from the world´s chemical weapons watchdog have begun examining the poison used in the attack which London blames on Moscow.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.