Putin claims the Novichok suspects are Innocent OK.

The two accused Skripal Novichok poisoners are not criminals at all but were just ordinary citizens going about their innocent business while walking the streets of Salisbury when the said nerve agent was sprayed onto the front door knob of the former Russian intelligence officer turned MI6 informant. This at least is the story Vladimir Putin wants us all to believe. The Russian president appears to think he has the perfect answer to the accusation that the two men seen on video and identified by the UK police as members of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency were responsible for one of the most dangerous and outrageous state-sanctioned assassination attempts in this country. These two men are innocent ok, says Putin, and promises more will be revealed. The two men, named by the Metropolitan police as Alexander Petrov and Rusian Boshirov, not only appeared on CCTV in Salisbury but were known to have entered the UK on a flight from Moscow and left Heathrow for Moscow the day after the poisoning, and when police checked out the hotel room where they had stayed in East London before travelling to Salisbury, lo and behold there were small traces of Novichok in the room. That’s more than circumstantial evidence, that’s what police and prosecutors like to call prima facie evidence. But Putin insists they were innocent civilians, not criminals at all. So on the basis of the Putin logic, these two men got caught up in this affair innocently, and happened to get a scraping of Novichok on their clothes while they were shopping for Salisbury’s finest fudge at the well-known Roly’s Fudge Pantry in the city to take back to their wives. The problem for the UK government is that the names of the two Russians were presumably taken from their passport details, and the passports, if provided by the GRU in Moscow, would be false documents. So the names may have been made up. Putin says he knows where these two individuals are, so I’m guessing his Kremlin henchmen have done a swift check around to find two people who look like Petrov and Boshirov but with different names, and they will be produced at a press conference to tell the world that at the moment when they were supposed to be in Salisbury they were actually watching a football match and eating pizzas in the Russian capital, and there will be photographs to prove it. Or he will produce the two real suspects and “prove” that they have never worked for the GRU and are in fact very keen Anglophiles and fudge-eaters who travel the world comparing fudge-makers for a future book to be entitled The Great Fudges of the World. I have to say, for sheer gall, Putin takes the biscuit, as we say in Blighty.