The Skripal Poisoning - A Very Deep British Affair

[David Guyatt]

Meanwhile, more details of how the use of Novichok in the 1996 murder came about. It sounds just about right to me. In those early Yeltsin years a great many state employees, in the military and elsewhere weren't being paid. Officers of army, navy and air force units were selling equipment for gawd's sake. Back then you could buy a nuke, or a military jet or tank -- all you needed was the means to get it out.

Below extract from Moon of Alabama

Bryan MacDonald @27khv
Russian opposition newspaper @novaya_gazeta reveals a police interrogation of Novichok creator Leonid Rink in which he admitted poison resembling #Novichok was removed from a lab and eventually sold to gangsters. It has already been used to kill in Russia.
https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/201...m-novichka
It is in Russian and I can only glean from it via machine translation.
In short:
- Prof. Leonid Rink, describe above in my piece, was tasked with looking into binary production of the four new agents Vladimir Uglev and Pyotr Kirpichev had developed
- This was at a time in the early 1990s when the state would not pay its scientists
- Rink was asked by someone he knew for a poison to kill "a dog". He synthesized a small amount of one of the new agents and sold it
- The person he sold it to came back and wanted more. He threatened to otherwise send some mafia killers.
- Rink was afraid (he reasonably says) and created more stuff (enough to kill 100 or so) and sold it to that person
- Over a few stations some of this stuff ended up killing a mafia banker in Moscow (as described above by Uglev in his interview.)
- The police eventually traced the stuff back to Rink but the case was made top secret and he was never indicted. Later the case was picked up again but it was too late for a indictment.
- It is not know where the rest of the stiff made and sold by Rink ended up.
(all the above without any guarantees - the machine translation may be wrong or may interpret it wrongly)
Novayagazeta says they have old top-secret protocols of Rink's interrogation by police. Their reporting seems to be solid.
Agents created in the early 1990s will likely have fallen apart by now. Such stuff isn't even stable under very careful storage conditions and 25 years is a quite long time.
But if the stuff created in the early 1990s by Rink and in the hands of whoknownswho was the stuff applied to the Skripals it MIGHT explain why they were not killed. I don't for now think this to be likely but one should give it a thought.

I thought the above was quite interesting - I had copied and saved this earlier this morning, but when I just went to get the URL for this post I saw that MoA had deleted this entire extract -- no reason given? Was it because the translation was inaccurate? Could it be that the article it relied on was wholly unreliable? I have no idea. What I do know is that the underlying info that came from the Twitter account of one Bryan MacDonald@27khv is still extant HERE.

In this respect I suppose it's also worth mentioning that a Daily Mail article of 20 May 2018 published at the unearthly hour of 03:49 (a.m.) and headlined: "Did Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov die in a kinky sex game" has also vanished. The Daily Mail website now return a 404 for the link and a search of their website comes up with zero for that headline. But why? My guess is that the article mentioned the presence in the house that night of "Denis", Glushkov's "young Russian lover". The article went on to reveal that Glushkov had been strangled with a dog leash. All good kinky stuff, if you're into S & M, but not, apparently, considered helpful in some quarters as the entire article has been Orwell-ed. I note only that the investigation into Glushkov's death is also being undertaken by Special Branch (now known as the Antiterrorism Unit).