Moscow — A Russian scientist told state media on Tuesday that he worked on an official programme to produce the nerve agent Britain says was used against ex-spy Sergei Skripal, contradicting Moscow’s claims it never developed Novichok. Leonid Rink, who told RIA Novosti he worked on a state-backed programme up to the early 1990s, said the former double agent and his daughter would be dead had Moscow been involved in his poisoning. "They are still alive. That means that either it was not the Novichok system at all, or it was badly concocted, carelessly applied," he said in the interview. "Or straight after the application, the English used an antidote, in which case they would have had to have known exactly what the poison was," he said. Rink said he worked at a state laboratory in the closed town of Shikhan for 27 years, where the development of Novichok formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation. "A large group of specialists in Shikhan and Moscow worked on Novichok," he said. De...
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