Thursday 29 March 2018

The Great Novichok Mystery

The police are now convinced that the main "delivery" of the military nerve agent Novichok that destroyed the lives of Sergei Skripal and his daughter occurred on the handle of the front door of their house in Salisbury. But there are so many unanswered questions if that's true. If the deadly nerve agent was literally smeared onto the handle, how the hell was it done? Was the perpetrator wearing special gloves, where are the gloves now, did it involve an attacker wearing any other kind of protection, is there someone in this country even now dying of nerve agent sickness that no one knows about because it's too risky for him/her to go to hospital? Did it happen in the early hours of the morning, when everyone was asleep, and no one noticed a man/woman dressed in a chemical suit approaching the front door of the Skripal home? If the attacker was only wearing gloves, could he or she have inhaled the fumes from the Novichok? In other words, when the perpetrator set off from, let's say, Moscow, with his nerve agent kit, what were his instructions? How did he/she get the stuff on board a plane, was it in a diplomatic bag or was it stuffed into a suitcase in the hold? If so, has the plane been checked for Novichok traces, and his/her fellow passengers and the crew and the baggage handlers the other end and Customs etc etc. It's endless. The police appear to be obsessed with locating where the bulk of the nerve agent ended up - ie the front door - and are now going to interview everyone in the area!! But surely they have done that already. Why aren't they working backwards to see where and how it could have come into the country? That's assuming the Russians don't keep a permanent supply in a safe in the embassy in London. Heathrow should be the number one area for checking - all Moscow flights from a certain date. Someone brought the stuff into the UK. There is no other explanation. When Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with Polonium-120, it was put into a teapot and the ex-FSB officer drank it when it was poured into a cup in the Millenium Hotel in Grosvenor Square. But that investigation, although long and complex, was relatively easy for the police because they had two suspects from the beginning. They could trace their movements and at the same time trace evidence of Polonium-120 all over the place. One of the suspects poured the remainder of the killer agent down the sink in his hotel bathroom. This time there are no suspects. All the police know is that the biggest concentration of Novichok has been found on the front door of the Skripal home. But there is no video of a man/woman approaching the door with thick gloves on. Until they discover how the nerve agent was brought into the country, the police are going to get nowhere in finding the culprit or culprits.

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