UK’s suspects in Skripal case(EXCLUSIVE)

The two men reached out to RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, as they wanted to tell their story. The first thing she asked them was to confirm their names, and they said that they were indeed Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, and that those were their real names.

She then asked them whether they worked for the GRU – Russian intelligence. They immediately denied it.

“You honestly look very tense,” Simonyan noted.

“And how would you look after all of that?” Petrov responded, before Boshirov said the British investigation “ruined their lives.”

“Well, we came there [to the UK] on March 2, then went to a railway station to see the timetable. We arrived in Salisbury on March 3 and tried to walk through the town, but we lasted for only half an hour because it was covered in snow,” Petrov said.

“Of course, we went there to see Stonehenge, Old Sarum, but we couldn’t do it because there was muddy slush everywhere. The town was covered by this slush. We got wet, took the nearest train and came back [to London].”

“We spent no more than an hour in Salisbury, mainly because of the lags between trains,” Boshirov said.“Maybe we did [approach] Skripal’s house, but we don’t know where is it located.”

“On March 4 we returned [to Salisbury] because everything had melted away in London, there was warm and sunny weather. We specifically went there [again] to see the Old Sarum and the cathedral and decided to finish this thing on March 4," said Petrov.

Simonyan clarified: “What thing?”

“To see the cathedral,” Petrov replied.

When Margarita Simonyan asked the two men whether they had Novichok or any poison with them, they emphatically said no. Then she asked whether they had the Nina Ricci perfume bottle that has been shown as evidence.

“Isn't it silly for decent lads to have women’s perfume? The customs are checking everything, they would have questions as to why men have women’s perfume in their luggage. We didn’t have it,” Boshirov said.

Both Petrov and Boshirov sounded distressed as they spoke about how their lives had changed since they were named in the UK as Russian intelligence agents, who attempted to poison the Skripals.

“When your life turned upside down, you don’t know what to do and where to go. We’re afraid of going out, we fear for ourselves, our lives and lives of our loved ones,” Boshirov said.

Asked whether they had recently been to any European state, the two said they were.

“Sure… in Switzerland we were for a couple of times… we spent New year in Switzerland.” The journey was part of their vacation, however the two have also been in Europe to do business that is related to sports nutrition.

We examine the market, look if there is something new – some biologically active additives, amino acids, vitamins, microelements. We pick up the most necessary, come here and decide how to deliver the new products from this market here.”

After asked if they were people on the screenshots released by the UK, the men said they indeed were.

“Yes. We have these clothes, this jacket is hanging in my wardrobe. The shoes are bought in England…This is the clothes were are currently wearing.”

“Are these clothes currently in Russia?” Simonyan asked.

“Yes, of course, we can show it.”

The RT editor-in-chief also touched upon the most puzzling picture of the two, the photo from the Gatwick airport.

“Here is the picture that puzzled the whole world, Gatwick airport, you are leaving through a gate literally in the same times, almost the same second. How did it happen?” she asked.

“We always go together through the same corridor and the same custom service officer or a policeman. One goes, the other waits. We went through the corridor together, we always [do it] together. How did it happen? It’s better to ask them [UK police],” Boshirov replied.

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Arguably the most awkward moments in the interview, which the two men named by Britain as suspects in the Skripal affair gave to RT’s editor-in-chief, came when their straightness came into question.
Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov are suspected by the UK of being Russian military intelligence agents, who were sent to Britain to assassinate former double agent Sergei Skripal. They came to RT to deny the claim. But apparently being perceived as a gay couple seemed to them at least as dreadful as being suspected of having used a chemical weapon, killing one person.

When asked by RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan about whether they had a Nina Ricci perfume bottle when they arrived in London, Boshirov objected the very idea that he or his friend would carry one.

“Don't you think that it's kind of stupid for two straight men to carry perfume for ladies?” he said, adding that such a possession would have been found by the British customs officers, who would see it as “suspicious”.

“Even an ordinary person would have questions. Why would a man need perfume for women?” agreed Petrov.

Simonyan jumped on the awkward vibe and pressed forward: “Speaking of straight men, all footage features you two together … What do you have in common that you spend so much time together?”

The only thing Boshirov came up with in response was “let's not breach anyone's privacy” and complained that instead of protection the two were expecting from RT they get an “interrogation”.

The nature of the relationship between Boshirov and Petrov came up again, when the former launched a tirade about how normal it is for two straight men to stay in the same hotel room.

“The British say many things. They say we lived in a number with a single bed,” he said. “It’s a normal thing for tourists to stay together in the same hotel apartment with two rooms. It saves money living like that. It’s more comfortable and more fun. This is a normal thing for any normal man.”

The outburst was finally cut short by Simonyan, who said whether the two shared a bed in the London hotel was “the last thing the world cares about now.”

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Bush Dr said:

Interesting that RT, Russia Television, has the name Nina Ricci for the perfume bottle when the mainstream UK media haven't released that info ....as far as I know

I was in Salisbury 3 days before each poisoning, what's your doubts gaius?

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Badfishy1 said:

Or the fact the cctv ‘proof’ shows them walking in the exact same place at the exact same time to the second but each photo only shows one man at a time with not a shadow of the other? If the Russians HAVE figured out time travel, perhaps they ARE the worlds biggest threat.

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gaiusmarius said:

there are probably a couple of identical exit channels for folks to exit through and as they were together i don't see why they couldn't be passing through separate corridors at the same time if you know what i mean. there is probably 2 or 3 of those exit channels if not more and they probably look the same, that would explain it no?

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Teddybrae said:

Man, I was with you on this thread which is very interesting. But you've used it to do a anti-government rant. I dis-respect that ...

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An Alternative Explanation to the Skripal Mystery


For weeks, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson have insisted that there is “no alternative explanation” to Russian government responsibility for the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last month.
But in fact the British government is well aware that such an alternative explanation does exist. It is based on the well-documented fact that the “Novichok” nerve agent synthesized by Soviet scientist in the 1980s had been sold by the scientist–who led the development of the nerve agent– to individuals linked to Russian criminal organizations as long ago as 1994 and was used to kill a Russian banker in 1995.

The connection between the Novichok nerve agent and a previous murder linked to the murky Russian criminal underworld would account for the facts of the Salisbury poisoning far better than the official line that it was a Russian government assassination attempt.
The credibility of the May government’s attempt to blame it on Russian President Vladimir Putin has suffered because of Yulia Skripal’s relatively rapid recovery, the apparent improvement of Sergei Skripal’s condition and a medical specialist’s statement that the Skripals had exhibited no symptoms of nerve agent poisoning.
How a Crime Syndicate Got Nerve Agent
The highly independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta has published a detailed account of how Russian organized crime figures obtained nerve agent in 1994 from Leonid Rink, the head of the former Soviet government laboratory that had synthesized it.
The newspaper gleaned the information about the transaction from Rink’s court testimony in the 1995 murder of prominent banker Ivan Kivelidi, the leader of the Russian Entrepreneurs’ Round Table, an organization engaged in a conflict with a powerful group of directors of state-owned enterprises.

Rink testified that after the post-Soviet Russian economic meltdown had begun he filled each of several ampoules with 0.25 grams of nerve agent and stored it in his own garage. Just one such ampoule held enough agent to kill 100 people, according to Rink, the lead scientist in the development of the series of nerve agents called Novichok (“newcomer” in Russian).
Rink further admitted that he had then sold one of the ampoules in 1995 to Artur Talanov, who then lived in Latvia and was later seriously wounded in an attempted robbery of a cash van in Estonia, for less than $1,800.

In 1995, some of that nerve agent was applied to Kivelidi’s telephone receiver to kill him, as the court documents in the murder case reveal. Police found that there were links between Talanov and Vladimir Khutsishvili, who had been a board member of Kivelidi’s bank, according to the Kivelidi murder investigation. Khutsishivili was eventually found guilty of poisoning Kivelidi, although it was found that he hired someone else to carry out the poisoning.

But that wasn’t the only nerve agent that Rink sold to gangsters. Rink admitted in court in 2007 that he had sold four of the vials to someone named Ryabov, who had organized crime connections in 1994. Those vials were said to have been seized later by Federal Security Police.
But the investigation of the Kivelidi murder found that vials had also fallen into the hands of other criminal syndicates, including one Chechen organization. Furthermore, Rink testified that he had given each of the recipients of the nerve agent detailed instructions on how it worked and how to handle it safely.

The Mystery of the Non-Lethal Nerve Agent

The newly-revealed story of how organized crime got control of hundreds of doses of lethal nerve agent from a government laboratory sheds crucial light on the mystery of the poisoning in Salisbury, especially in light of the timeline of the Skripals on the day of the poisoning and their unexpectedly swift recovery.
Reports of their activities on March 4 show that they were strolling in central Salisbury, dining, and visiting a pub for several hours before collapsing on a park bench sometime after 4 pm.

The announcements of Yulia’s rapid recovery on March 28 and that Sergei was now “stable” and “improving rapidly” about a week later appears to be in contradiction with the British insistence that they
were poisoned by a Russian government intelligence team. The Novichok-type nerve agent has been characterized as quick acting and highly lethal.
But the official Russian forensic investigation in conjunction with the Kivelidi’s murder, as reported by Novaya Gazeta, concluded that the Novichok did not take effect instantaneously but generally took from one and a half to five hours.

The Russian government has now made an official issue of the fact that the nerve agent used in the poisoning proved not to be lethal. In his news conference on April 14 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Swiss Spiez Laboratory, working on the case for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), had found traces in the Skripals’ bloodsample, of the nerve agent BZ, which was never developed by Soviet scientists but was in the arsenals of the United States and Britain.
Lavrov also acknowledged that the lab had in addition found traces of “A-234”–one of the nerve agents in the Novichok series – “in its initial state and in high concentration”. Lavrov argued that had the assassins used A-234 nerve agent, which he noted is at least eight times more deadly than VX nerve gas, it “would have killed the Skripals.”

But if the poisoning had been done with some of the A-234 nerve agent that was sold by Rink to organized crime figures, it probably would not have been that lethal.
Vil Mirzayanov, the counter-intelligence specialist on the team that developed Novichok and who later revealed the existence of the Novichok program, explained in an interview with The Guardian that the agent lost its effectiveness. “The final product, in storage, after one year is already losing 2%, 3%,” Mirzayanov said, “The next year more, and the next year more. In 10-15 years, it’s no longer effective.”

Exposure to even a large dose of such a normally lethal poison more than 25 years after it was first produced could account for the apparent lack of normal symptoms associated with exposure to that kind of nerve agent experienced by the Skripals, as well as for their relatively speedy recovery. That lends further credibility to a possible explanation that someone with a personal grudge against Sergei Skripal carried out the poisoning.

An Absence of Nerve Agent Symptoms?

Also challenging the official British line is a statement by a medical specialist involved in the Salisbury District Hospital’s care for the Skripals revealing that they had not exhibited any symptoms of nerve agent poisoning.

Stephen Davies, a consultant on emergency medicine for the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the Salisbury District Hospital, wrote a letter published in The Times on March 16 that presented a problem for the official British government position. Davies wrote,“[M]ay I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning in Salisbury, and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning.” Obviously, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were “patients” in the hospital and were thus included in that statement.
The Times made the unusual decision to cover the Davies letter in a news story, but tellingly failed to quote the crucial statement in the letter that “no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning in Salisbury” or to report on the significance of the statement.

To rule out the possibility that Davies intended to say something quite different, this writer requested a confirmation or denial of what Davies had written in his letter from the press officer for the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, Patrick Butler. But Butler did not respond for a week and then refused directly to deny, confirm or explain the Davies statement.

Instead Butler said in an email, “Three people were admitted and treated as inpatients at Salisbury District Hospital for the effects of nerve agent poisoning as Stephen Davies wrote.” When he was reminded that the letter had actually said something quite different, Butler simply repeated the statement he had just sent and then added, “The Trust will not be providing any further information on this matter.”

Butler did not respond to two separate requests from the writer for assistance in contacting Davies. The refusal of the NHS Foundation Trust to engage at all on the subject underlines the sensitivity of the British government about nerve agent that didn’t work.

There are many individuals in Russia whose feelings about Sergei Skripal’s having become a double agent for Britain’s MI6 – including former colleagues of his – could provide a personal motive for the poisoning. And it is certainly plausible that those individuals could have had obtained some of the nerve agent sold by Leonid Rink that entered the black market.
Neither the British government nor the Russian government is apparently eager to acknowledge that alternative explanation. The British don’t want it discussed, because they are determined to use the Salisbury poisoning to push their anti-Russian agenda; and the Russians may be reluctant to talk about it, because it would inevitably get into details of a secret nerve agent research project that they have claimed they closed down in 1992, despite Rink’s testimony in the court case that he was still doing some work for the Russian military until 1994.
Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare(Just World Books, 2014).

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Brother Nature said:

I read a rather interesting article offering a rather logical alternative explanation, which I'll post below. I highly doubt those two broke back mountaineers had anything to do with it, let alone being of international spy caliber. It seems like the UK really have no idea who or why Skripal was poisoned but are trying to spin it in their favor. Russiaphobia, so hot right now.

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Gypsy Nirvana said:

Yeah....really, who would want to visit a cold Salisbury, coming all the way from Russia, for such a short trip, checking into an East End B&B, then getting the train a long, long way to Salisbury and not even touring the cathedral (not seen on cathedral camera) nor even visiting Stone Henge.

All a bit fishy at the UK and the Russian end from what I can make of it, besides hiding Russian spies in the English countryside is bound to attract the wrong sort of attention.

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mean mr.mustard said:

But incidentally Solsbury hill is in Somerset, which is a bit west of Salisbury.

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