I see only a name
and I feel fine
A neighbour of a Russian businessman found dead in London told today how he had witnessed “suspicious” activity outside his home.
Counter-terrorism police are investigating the “unexplained” death of Nikolai Glushkov, 68, who was discovered collapsed at his terraced house in New Malden by his daughter Natalia on Monday night.
A Russian newspaper reported a friend of Mr Glushkov saying that there were “strangulation” marks on his neck and it was not clear if it was murder or suicide.
Mr Glushkov was a former employee and close friend of oligarch Boris Berezovsky, an outspoken Kremlin critic, who was found dead at his home near Ascot in 2013 with a scarf around his neck. A coroner recorded an open verdict.
Glushkov, a former senior Russian executive linked to late Kremlin opponent Boris Berezovsky was found dead in unexplained circumstances (AFP/Getty Images)
Today a neighbour of Mr Glushkov said people in expensive “supercars” had visited the house in recent months.
Glushkov was found collapsed at his New Maldon home by his daughter Natalia
The resident, 35, who did not wanted to be named, said: “There was something strange about the number of supercars pulling up outside the house.
There was a Ferrari and a Lamborghini I believe. One of the cars was yellow and really stuck out. Houses in the road are about £500,000 and people do not have supercars like that. It was all very strange, I am going to report it to the police. The activity was unusual. It makes you wonder if it was connected with what had happened. I was suspicious.”
The address in New Malden which has been sealed-off by police after Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov was found dead (PA)
Mr Glushkov lived alone in Clarence Drive with a cat and dog. Russian sources in London said he had “no guard, no servants”, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant.
“Allegedly, his daughter who came to visit discovered traces of strangulation on her father’s body,” reported the newspaper,
Mr Glushkov was director of Russian state airline Aeroflot in the Nineties and a close friend of Mr Berezovsky. However, when the billionaire fell out with President Putin in 1999, Mr Glushkov was charged with defrauding Aeroflot and jailed for five years.
After being released he fled to Britbut faced fresh charges of fraud in 2010. He was sentenced to eight years in his absence last year. Mr Glushkov, who feared he was on a Kremlin hit list, was also linked to Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy assassinated in London in 2006 as well as Andrei Lugovoi, the Russian MP believed to have carried out the killing.
Scotland Yard said Mr Glushkov’s death was not being linked to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. The counter-terrorism command unit was leading the investigation into the death “as a precaution”.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/stra ... 89721.html
Soviet Scientist Who Developed Novichok Poison Used on Sergei Skripal: ‘I’m Sorry’
He helped make the secret poison used against a Russian ex-spy. Now Vil Mirzayanov looks on his handiwork with regret.
On Monday, British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed Parliament, accusing the Russians of using a nerve agent to try to kill Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer turned British double agent resettled in Salisbury after a spy swap, and his daughter, Yulia.
It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as novichok. Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so.
— Prime Minister Theresa May
The person who understands the effects of novichoks best is Vil Mirzayanov, a scientist and later head of Foreign Technical Counterintelligence at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT) in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, which allegedly produced the shadowy class of binary nerve agents known as the “novichoks” (newcomers). And he has a message for Skripal and his daughter: my bad.
“I’d tell him [Skripal] that I’m very sorry that I participated in the development of these weapons,” Mirzayanov told The Daily Beast.
GosNIIOKhT scientists developed the agents under a program codename “Folio” beginning in the 1980s. Mirzayanov spoke out about the covert program as the Soviet Union fell, earning him a prison term at home before he escaped to exile in the United States.
During the Cold War, the idea that a novichok agent would be used in a covert assassination seemed alien to Mirzayanov and his fellow scientists. The weapons, developed in intense secrecy by Soviet scientists, were originally designed for use in bombs and shells on a battlefield rather than a cloak-and-dagger assassination in a suburb in southern England.
“I couldn’t imagine. No one could imagine. It’s outrageous. We were convinced at the time that we were developing these weapons and testing others for the protection of the country and for defense,” Mirzayanov said. “It was not our goal. None of the scientists supposed that it would be used with terrorist goals. It was a military thing. It was a weapon for mass killing.”
Despite the lethality of novichok agents—reportedly 10 times as powerful as the VX nerve agent used to assassinate Kim Jong Un’s brother in a Malaysian airport—Skripal and his daughter managed to survive the attack and are recuperating in the hospital. But Mirzayanov expects that the two have a long road to recovery.
“If you’re poisoned by a nerve agent, it’s forever,” Mirzayanov said, citing the case of his friend and fellow GosNIIOKhT employee, the late Andrei Zheleznyakov, who was accidentally poisoned by a novichok.
Zheleznyakov received a dose of A-232, a component used in Novichok No. 5, during a laboratory accident in the 1980s. Doctors gave Zheleznyakov atropine, a common nerve agent antidote, and he survived following a lengthy recuperation. But the once vibrant researcher was never the same, according to Mirzayanov: “He wasn’t capable of functioning normally afterwards.” Zheleznyakov reportedly suffered from chronic weakness, epilepsy, liver problems, and difficulty focusing, among other maladies, before his death five years later.
“I’d tell him [Skripal] that I’m very sorry that I participated in the development of these weapons.”
— Vil Mirzayanov
In Skripal’s case, British investigators may have been able to identify the use of a novichok with help from a portable mass spectrometer, according to Mirzayanov. The scientific devices could detect the presence of a novichok if investigators had reliable information on the chemical composition of the nerve agents.
For the prime minister to be able to publicly accuse the Russians of using a nerve agent like a novichok, British authorities at least must have had access to novichok’s unique chemical signature—which it legally could have had despite the Chemical Weapons Convention, due to the clause of countries being able to hold samples for testing in these incidences.
Testing for novichoks, even based on a formula published by Mirzayanov in a memoir based on his work in the 1980s, is a potential sign that the British have potential access to newer variants of the nerve agent.
Gwyn Winfield—the editorial director of CBRNe World magazine, a trade publication for those dealing with chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive threats—said it’s possible that the Russians continued to develop novichoks in the years after the publication of Mirzayanov’s book. But even then, the British were probably able to reliably gather minute traces with a novichok’s unique chemical signature.
“You’d have to detect the phosphate chain, and they [mass spectrometers] are probably looking at broad families detecting something hazardous in the environment,” Winfield added.
Winfield said it’s also important to note that we don’t yet have any idea what particular novichok variant hit the Skripals and the police officer who responded to them.
When Winfield first heard about the incident, he and other journalists thought it was a fentanyl overdose. “When the Salisbury Hospital shut down, [it was done so for] fentanyl poisoning,” Winfield told The Daily Beast. “That sounded right, that we were looking at two individuals who had overdosed on something.”
Fentanyl wouldn’t be out of the question: Prior to its more recent use in the United States as an opioid, Winfield said the drug has been used for assassination attempts. “It was effective and inefficient, and there was plausible deniability,” he said, pointing out that victims could be thought to have overdosed.
When Prime Minister May came out and said the culprit was novichoks, Winfield said he was surprised, particularly given that Skripal reportedly became aggressive, waved his arms, and pointed to the sky while yelling in Russian, he said. “Those don’t fit into what we know about organophosphate exposures,” Winfield explained—which means that while novichok is being pointed to as the source nerve agent, it’s possible that it was swirled with another drug that produced hallucinogenic qualities that were more similar to a fentanyl poisoning.
“If they wanted to kill me, it would’ve been easy. But God has saved me so far.”
— Vil Mirzayanov
But that’s impossible to confirm, Winfield said. “It might have been a cocktail of drugs, it might have been [Skripal’s] unique physiology,” he surmised.
The business of killing with chemicals is an ugly one and it weighed heavily on Mirzayanov’s conscience in the waning days of the Cold War. The former Soviet scientist once in charge of protecting GosNIIOKhT’s secrets from Western spies began a crusade to eradicate chemical weapons with a Moscow News article and an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1992.
Mirzayanov told The Daily Beast that representatives from the U.S. intelligence community later urged him not to publish chemical formulas and compounds for the production of novichoks because of concerns about the dissemination of know-how for the powerful weapons.
“The U.S. government doesn’t like me because they can’t use me like a puppet,” he said. “I’m not a puppet. I refuse to cooperate the way they want. I told them, ‘Go to the court and challenge me.’ I believe Russian secrets are not American secrets.”
That we don’t know much about the subsequent development of novichoks after Mirzayanov had access to GosNIIOKhT’s secrets means it’s also hard for us to know how the Skripals got sick. “It could be a gel, vapor, or a liquid,” Winfield said. Nerve agents tend to use corrosive acids, which mean their precursors are usually stored separately, Winfield said, but it’s possible this novichok doesn’t require mixing of chemicals and could be directly applied to a person’s skin or on a surface with “just a pair of gloves,” he said.
Winfield said that at this point, there are more questions than answers about novichoks and how they were used in the Salisbury attack. That Skripal, his daughter, and the police officer lived is also puzzling, given that Mirzayanov said practically no human testing occurred, unlike other nerve agents like sarin and VX. The survival of the victims could be due to human incompetence or their unique physiology, or even the cooler temperatures, that saved them.
With Russian intelligence veterans like Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal in the crosshairs of assassins, some dissidents are now worried about their own safety. Mirzayanov, 83 years old and living openly in Princeton, New Jersey, is unmoved by the potential threat from the Russian government.
After he spoke out against GosNIIOKhT’s chemical weapons programs, Russian authorities arrested Mirzayanov and put him in the KGB’s notorious Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. He survived, walking out of a place where so many before him had entered but never left.
“If they wanted to kill me, it would’ve been easy,” he says now. “But God has saved me so far.” \https://www.thedailybeast.com/sorry-i-developed-the-weapon-that-poisoned-a-russian-spy
What Is Novichok? The Nerve Agent Russia Allegedly Used in the U.K.
Theresa May said on Wednesday that Moscow was 'culpable' for the poisoning in the English city of Salisbury of a Russian former double agent with Novichok
Reuters Mar 14, 2018 5:25 PM
Police officers stand guard at the bottom of the road where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal lives in Salisbury, England, Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Police officers stand guard at the bottom of the road where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal lives in Salisbury, England, Tuesday, March 13, 2018AP Photo/Matt Dunham
British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Wednesday that Moscow was "culpable" for the poisoning in the English city of Salisbury of a Russian former double agent with Novichok, one of the deadliest chemical weapons ever developed. May expelled 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation, the largest move of its kind since the Cold War.
Here is a brief overview of Novichok:
* First developed in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, Novichok, or "newcomer", is a series of highly toxic nerve agents with a slightly different chemical composition than the more commonly known VX and sarin poison gases. * Novichok agents are believed to be five to 10 times more lethal, although there are no known previous uses. Moscow is not believed to have ever declared Novichok or its ingredients to the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversees a treaty banning their use.
* Novichok, the fourth generation of poison gas, was made with agrochemicals so that offensive weapons production could more readily be hidden within a legitimate commercial industry, according to U.S. chemical weapons expert Amy Smithson.
* Publications about development and testing of Novichok in the 1990s led to U.S. suspicions that the then USSR had a secret weapons program and did not declare all it had in its stockpile when it joined the OPCW. * Russia, along with the United States, once ran one of the largest chemical weapons programs in the world. It completed the destruction of a stockpile declared to the OPCW last year. The United States is in the final stages of destroying its own stockpile.
* Russia was once believed to possess thousands of tonnes of weaponised Novichok varieties and their precursors, according to a 2014 report by the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-partisan group working to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
* The chemical "causes a slowing of the heart and restriction of the airways, leading to death by asphyxiation", said pharmacology expert Prof. Gary Stephens at the University of Reading. "One of the main reasons these agents are developed is because their component parts are not on the banned list."
* The weaponisation of any chemical is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Moscow is a signatory. The Salisbury attack was to be raised in closed door sessions of the OPCW's executive council when it begins three days of meetings in The Hague on Tuesday.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/what-is ... -1.5908067