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The Magic Of Novichok – Deadly Agent Found In Perfume Bottle
This before-after advertisement for Novichok perfume, featuring Yulia Skripal, made the rounds a while ago.
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The ad was published before May 27. Its creator must have had real vision. Last night the BBC reported:
Amesbury: Novichok found in perfume bottle, says victim's brother
The nerve agent that poisoned two people in Amesbury was contained in a perfume bottle, the brother of one of the victims has said.
Matthew Rowley said his brother Charlie, who is seriously ill in hospital, told him he had picked up the perfume bottle.
The Metropolitan Police, which is leading the investigation, refused to confirm the claim.
Previously the force has said only that it was found in a "small bottle".
Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia both mysteriously recovered from the alleged 'nerve agent' 10 times as deadly as VX. It was the magic of the Novichok perfume that did it.
One victim of the second 'Novichok' incident in Wiltshire, Matthew Rowley, is also on the path to full recovery. His friend Dawn Strugess, a drug addict with serious medical preconditions, died. Like with the Skripal case the details of the second incident raise lots of new questions.
According to the police the 'small bottle' contained an agent of the 'Novichok' group:
[S]cientists have now confirmed to us that the substance contained within the bottle is Novichok.
Further scientific tests will be carried out to try and establish whether it is from the same batch that contaminated Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March – this remains a main line of enquiry for police.
Inquiries are under way to establish where the bottle came from and how it came to be in Charlie’s house.
How does a presumably highly fluid nerve agent in a perfume bottle fit the police assertions about the 'Novichok' "gel" on the doorknob of Sergej Skripal's house? Was that the skin-care variant of the 'Novichok' beauty series?
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This is another hole in the official Skripal story the British government is putting out.
That does not prevent 'officials' from spinning more nonsense around it.
Just after the Justice Department indicted officers of the Russian Military Intelligence G.R.U., some anonymous 'officials' claim that the G.R.U. is also responsible for the Skripal incident. As usual there is zero evidence or even logic behind this claim:
U.K. Poisoning Inquiry Turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments
British investigators believe the March 4 attack on the former spy, Sergei V. Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, was most probably carried out by current or former agents of the service, known as the G.R.U., who were sent to his home in southern England, according to one British official, one American official and one former American official familiar with the inquiry, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.
The piece quotes the anti-Russian 'expert' Mark Galeotti who asserts:
“That the G.R.U. kills people abroad has been amply demonstrated in a variety of other cases,” …
He does not give one example.
Sergej Skripal was a British agent within the G.R.U. He was caught and sentenced to 15 years. After six years of jail he was pardoned and swapped in exchange for Russian spies caught in the west. He was no longer of interest. Killing him would end future spy swaps. The G.R.U. had certainly no interest in doing that.
Galeotti is the non-expert who invented the "Gerasimov doctrine" which, he asserted, described Russia's ways to wage "non-linear" and "hybrid wars". Lots of nonsense was written about that idea. Three years later, after being called out, Galeotti had to admit that his interpretation of an article by the Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov was utterly false. Gerasimov did not describe a new Russian doctrine but the 'western' way of waging 'regime change' wars.
Galeotti attributed the evil aspects of 'western' operations Gerasimov described to Russia.
A similar misattribution is happening in the 'Novickok' tale.
This is my own theory on the Skripal affair…
The finding of a heavily contaminated, small glass container in Charlie Rowley’s brand new home just off Princess Way in Muggleton Road, Amesbury, SP4 7GY, (so recently built that the postcode, street name, and imagery are not even listed on google maps… https://goo.gl/maps/us26Q1g1F3U2 ) means that we can finally begin to put together a story that probably explains the Skripal Affair, and how the UK government is able to claim the implicated chemical is a weapon, which originated in Russia.
Dawn Sturgess who has sadly died, and Charlie Rowley who is seriously ill are both well known as substance abusers. They live just a few miles away from Salisbury in Amesbury. The connection between Dawn and Charlie, and the Skripal’s is at present, just the implicated chemical, the same chemical which ties both poisonings together, but that’s enough extra information to start putting a story together. Who knows if it’s true, but I think it’s probably very close to the mark…
It was never clear to me just what ex Russian spy Sergi Skripal actually did for a living, how did he maintain his standard of living, nice house, BMW etc., since settling in the UK? It was the Petrol Station CCTV footage which was distributed, showing Sergi buying a pint of milk and a pasty, and recorded just prior to his poisoning, that initially caught my attention. The long leather jacket he wore just said ‘crime’ to me, it looked like the sort of leather jacket Phil Mitchell used to wear on East Enders, or that worn by some criminals acting in foreign mafia films.
It seemed to me at the time, that this may be how Sergi was earning a living in the UK… as a crook. Once a hood, always a hood? Both Yulia and his joint poisoning just seemed too strange, inept and high profile to be a deliberate ‘hit’ job by the Russian State, and the speed of the substances effect was too slow, it took hours, not a couple of minutes, as a chemical weapon might have taken. Yulia his daughter, had just flown in from St Petersburg, Russia.
The locations where the police suggested the substance was found were on door handles of the house and car, the sort of places which would become contaminated if one had already got the offending chemical on ones hands – perhaps by a different method completely. Since the start of the Skripal affair, it has seemed to me that Yulia may have been carrying some type of illegal chemical for Sergi when she arrived in the UK, partly because they both were poisoned so shortly after she arrived in the UK, and partly because the UK government seemed so sure there was a Russian connection with the implicated chemical. Very early on in the investigation, RT broadcast a comment from a Russian expert, that the symptoms from which the Skripal’s were suffering when found, sounded rather like a Fentanyl overdose. As we will see later, I wish I had paid more attention to this line of thinking.
Then we have Yulia’s current presence at an undisclosed military base near London, and the strange exclusive Reuters interview filmed in an isolated shrubby woodland so as not to give away the location, with lots of jet aircraft engine noise in the background. Although it wasn’t really an interview, because all Yulia did was read a prepared statement from a teleprompter screen to the camera. She didn’t answer any questions, because none were asked, that was the deal, apparently. It seems clear, she is co-operating with the UK authorities, but it appears she is not free to go, or talk freely, and that seems to indicate to me, both her and Sergi were jointly involved in something criminal, which the UK authorities can hold over them.
In the last couple of years, a drug epidemic has swept the world, it is the illicit supply of Heroin or Cocaine, which has been cut with synthetic opioids, and it has lead to thousands upon thousands of deaths every year through overdosing. Initially the drug cutting took place with the synthetic opioid Fentanyl, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl – when taken together they are 100 times stronger than heroin alone. More recently, a synthetic opioid used to cut the heroin is Carfentanil, when taken together they are 5000 times stronger than the heroin alone. Carfentanil is so strong, it has been suggested that it should be considered a potential weapon of mass destruction should rogue states or terrorists get their hands on it. Canadian authorities recently sized a large amount of Carfentanil hidden in printer toner cartridges, the quantity was sufficient that if given as a single dose, there was sufficient quantity to kill every man, woman and child in Canada.
Fentanyl is so strong, that if the substance is suspected as the cause of an emergency overdose, medical staff treating a patient need to take very special precautions, and follow strict decontamination procedures, as just a small amount of contamination to the skin can result in symptoms:
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/fentanyl/healthcareprevention.html
But one can see why these synthetic opioids are so attractive, up till recently, they have been relatively easy to get hold of (China didn’t restrict supply until 2017), and cutting it with heroin and other bulking agents can make a small amount of heroin go a long long way, it’s a drug dealers dream, and a easy way to make a lot of money, for not a lot of cost.
Here’s a US study on Fentanyl use…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395917301275
Here’s a very recent April 2018 article from a UK drug charities blog discussing Fentanyl… (Note the specific mention of “Salisbury” at the bottom of this blog post…and that CGL is currently undertaking research into the prevalence of fentanyl in the UK and that they are issuing harm reduction advice, and they have planned two additional roundtable events, one for Salisbury and one for Exeter to prevent future fentanyl-related deaths.)
https://www.changegrowlive.org/latest/blog/fentanyl-and-drug-related-deaths-the-local-perspective
Here is a US site dealing with illicit Carfentanil…
https://www.rehabcenter.net/carfentanil-laced-heroin-abuse-addiction/
And here is a new British Medical Journal paper just published in April 2018 suggesting the Synthetic Opioid epidemic may have just begun to hit the UK…
https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k1564
On October 26, 2002, Russian Special Forces deployed a chemical aerosol against Chechen terrorists to rescue hostages in the Dubrovka theatre. Its use confirmed Russian military interest in chemicals with effects on personnel and caused 125 deaths through a combination of the aerosol and inadequate medical care. Researchers at the UK’s biological warfare labs at Porton Down found carfentanil and remifentanil in clothing from two British survivors of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis. The team concluded that the Russian military used an aerosol mist of carfentanil and remifentanil to subdue Chechen hostage takers:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23002178
The World Health Organisation claims that Carfentanil has been banned by the US Dept Defense for Battlefield use under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
http://www.who.int/medicines/access/controlled-substances/Critical_Review_Carfentanil.pdf?ua=1
Several other things of interest… In 2015, Estonia was listed as having the highest death rate/million of the population from synthetic opioid overdose of any country in the world, Five times the European average. Yulia Skripal lives in St Petersburg Russia, just 80 miles from the border of Estonia. Alexandr Skripal – Sergi’s son, apparently passed away very suddenly last year (2017) aged only 43, while visiting St Petersburg, his death is recorded as being complicated by sudden and unexplained liver failure, his death still seems somewhat of a mystery, however, powerful synthetic opioids like these are known to cause liver failure. It’s been revealed that Sergi went to Estonia in 2016, but nobody knows why.
So there we have it… that’s my story, and my claim is that the Skripal’s were either…
1. Accidentally contaminated by a very powerful illicit Synthetic Opioid which Yulia had brought into the country, suggesting that Sergi is probably a drug dealer, and is at least partly responsible for the distribution of these dangerous drugs in and around the Salisbury area.
2. Sergi is a drug user, and accidentally overdosed on a new Synthetic Opioid drug which has recently entered the Salisbury area, and Yulia was accidentally contaminated by contact with Sergi.
The UK government is obviously claiming that Carfentanil can be considered a Russian military grade weapon, because of the Moscow Theatre Hostage Crisis, where it was used by Russian Special forces to bring the crisis to an end.
A234 is probably the catalogue reference for the substance found on the clothing of the two British Survivors of the 2002 Moscow Theater Siege which Porton Down found in an analysis after they had been returned to the UK. The 2012 published paper covering this (linked to above), spells Carfentanil out as one of the Nerve Agents, used by the Russian Military because of how they used it in the Siege which killed 125 people. The UK government now call it a “Military Grade Nerve Agent”, and then very specifically refer to this as “A Novichok” not “is Novichok”… because Novichok just means “Newcomer”. Carfentanil was “a newcomer”, it’s first use in this way was by the Russian Military in the 2002 siege.
Yulia possibly brought it into the UK for Sergi, hence the UK’s claim of a Russian connection, and hence why she’s still being held in the UK, and why she can’t ask for Russian assistance, and why she is not free to talk to the press. The deal is that if she and Sergi play ball on this, they can eventually go free, to live a life elsewhere, probably under a new identity.
Posted by: Max_B | Jul 16 2018 23:58 utc | 31
The couple on the CCTV (link) were first said to be Skripals themselves, although they looked nothing like.
Next, they were persons of interest as having been very close by. Then, they were described as possibly Russian, and it was stated that the pix were being shown to Russian expats, so as to identify them. (> GB press. one ex. link.) Besides some short murky footage of 3 other people (possibly the Skripals + a passer-by), these were the only pictures or e-fits published of ‘unidentified’ people. There were reasons to suppose the proximity and/or involvement of this pair –> the idea of Russian guilt was hovering, as from the vid there was no reason to suppose they were Russian. (They look and move ‘very British’ imho.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5503151/Police-probing-Russians-caught-CCTV-Skripal-poisoning.html
Later, after the 2nd ‘poison’ incident, they were identified as Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, by internet sleuths, many like myself thought of them right away. Imho, yes, -> them.
https://imgur.com/a/zdWycW0
Then, all quiet. It appeared no individual perps were being sought for from the ‘area’ itself. Putin did it, but via what agent, how, was left hanging and not even speculated about. No mention of everyone in the park being questioned, or calls to the public about seeing suspicious ppl in Zizzis, etc.
Shouts of ‘Russia Guilty’ are often the most primitive type of lie — actor subsitution. (Lalique lamp and precious pot with rare cactus, bust up on the floor: “Johnny done it! Not me!”) Perhaps, GB authorities figured it out not from the bottom-up (the crime scene, witnesses, etc.) but from the top-down, probably via the analysis of the ‘poison’. If so, that toxic substance came from somewhere specific, which would explain the strange descriptions and reports characterising it, shunting it into a murky generic category – Novichoks, gotta sound Russki – exact formula, what poss. provenance, strength, can’t be known (aka kept secret), no details are given, etc.
How was DS Bailey exposed ? Unknown! Mentioned: -> At the scene (the park bench presumably) but how is not detailed. Did he touch Yulia? -> As a ‘first responder’. What does that imply? Was he alone? What about other policemen? -> At the Skripal home, having taken the keys from Sergei’s pocket, touching the doornob? When was he there, how soon afterwards did he fall ill, when was he hospitalised, etc.? In the case of a ‘mysterious Russian’ poisoning there would be no reason to keep back info about Bailey.
The simultaneous presence of Charlie, Dawn, Yulia, Sergei (+ Bailey?) 16.00 on 3 March in the shopping center/walkway/adjacent bench in Salisbury, with all 5 falling ill, cannot be coincidence.
1. link is through geographical proximity. E.g. Dawn picked up a perfume bottle spotted on the ground near the bench, took it to Charlie’s or X where it was left in the bathroom until she opened it … and later Charlie was there, touched the bottle now on the sink, etc.
2. they knew each other / came into contact via a 3rd party. — Bailey present as Police or a Co-conspirator.. Here all kinds of Le Carré plots can be imagined. E.g. Sergei knew Charlie – Charlie called Sergei in Zizzi’s …. The red bag carried by the person on the CCTV (=Dawn) and subsequently, reportedly, recovered from the bench scene (I am not convinced by the photos though it is possible) has to be accounted for.
This all hinges around …. The RED BAG. Stay tuned! 🙂
Posted by: Noirette | Jul 17 2018 16:15 utc | 55
Jackrabbit @ 36
Max_B says it is “It was never clear to me just what ex Russian spy Sergi Skripal actually did for a living …” – but Skripal would’ve been paid to defect AND Skripal’s knowledge and insights made it likely that he had ongoing work with MI6 – including a possible connection to the Steel dossier;
Experts suggest that sharing knowledge and experience is often the only way a former spy can legally make a living. The British government provides a stipend, but in the past defectors have protested that it is too small. In the late 1990s, an ex-Russian spy named Victor Makarov was given a £65k pay-off, now living in the North East of England, he eventually went on hunger strike over his miserable living conditions and eventually ended up camping outside Downing Street in protest for 8 days.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2007-05-21/debates/0705221000002/MrVictorMakarov
Makarov “I am deeply distressed by the British Government’s treatment of me after I risked my life,” he continued. “I love my house but I cannot work because of my history and lack of qualifications and receive no pension. I need some money to live on.”
Others former spies have had to resort to creative and illegal means to augment their pensions. Oleg Gordievsky, a senior K.G.B. officer whose defection in 1985 was a serious blow to the Soviet government, hosted a game show for a time. Mikhail Butkov, another K.G.B. defector, was imprisoned for three years for creating a fake business school and defrauding would-be students out of 1.5 million pounds.
This is not unusual at all, these people have a very unusual skill set, they don’t get a lot of money off the UK government, and after defecting it’s natural to gravitate back to what they know to get a higher standard of living.
the travel to Estonia theory is sketchy – wouldn’t a drug dealer find it easier to recruit an Estonian ‘mule’ instead of carrying the drug across multiple borders? AFAIK, becasue Estonia is part of EU there would be far less border controls for Estonia-UK travel;
I was only trying to point to a geographical connection between the Baltic states, these synthetic opioids, and proximity to St Petersburg. The WHO state in their report on Carfentanil:
“In Europe, the first reports of carfentanil seizures occurred in December 2012 in Latvia and it was reportedly linked to a spate of deaths among injecting drug users in the country the following year (EMCDDA, 2014). High mortality rates related to the fentanyls have continuously been reported in Estonia since the mid 2000s.”
I’m not suggesting that Sergi did the smuggling himself, I’m suggesting it was a familiy business… his children made multiple trips back and forth between St Petersburg and the UK each year. His son died of sudden liver failure last year in St Petersburg. I think dealing with pure forms of these lethal drugs is a big risk.
if Skripal was a user instead of dealer, couldn’t he easily get drugs in the UK to feed his habit?
Yes. He could have done some Carfentanil laced Coke in Zizzi’s toilets for example. We know this product is in the UK. But I feel option 1) is probably more plausible, particularly as Swiss CWC Labs suggest a pure source was provided.
What of the British refusal to allow Skripal’s cousin to visit? How does that make any sense?
Yulia can’t have free and open contact with people, she’s effectively under house arrest at a military base, she can’t leave, but the UK can’t charge her either, or their whole story would go up in flames. She’s in limbo at the moment because she’s a liability to the UK Government. It’s the same reason she did not answer any questions in the Reuters video statement she made, she’s not free to.
Posted by: Max_B | Jul 17 2018 16:40 utc | 57
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