Russia Says Names Of Novichok Poison Suspects Means “Nothing” To Them

The crown prosecution service named Russian intelligence officers Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov as the suspects. “So this was not a rogue operation”.

Speaking ahead of the announcement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday denied any Russian role in the poisoning, saying that Russia has no new information about it because Britain has refused to share case files. Rather than accept responsibility for its actions, the Russian government has offered only denials and counteraccusations – anything to deflect attention and distract from its guilt.

Russia’s UN Ambassador accused London of “unleashing a disgusting anti-Russia hysteria”.

Later Thursday, British UN Ambassador Karen Pierce reiterated before the 15-member UN Security Council in NY that the evidence pointed to Russian involvement. Zakharova also said Moscow had asked the British embassy to let it examine fingerprint records that Russian nationals have to provide to obtain a British visa.

Police also appealed to the public to share any information on them.

Still, the release of Britain’s forensic evidence will have much wider ramifications for Russia’s relations with Western countries.

Prosecutors will not be applying to Russian Federation for the extradition of the two men, but a European Arrest Warrant has been obtained.

Ruslan Boshirov has a profile on a Russian social media site, My World, that was posted in July 2013.

Basu added that photos of the men were being made public in the hope that a member of the public will recognise them.

He said the pair, who are in their 40s, flew into London two days before the attack and stayed in a hotel, where traces of Novichok were found in their room.

They paid a day-trip to Salisbury, a sleepy city in the southwest of England, on the Saturday to carry out reconnaissance.

Britain’s United Nations ambassador is accusing Russia of failing to uphold the ban on using chemical weapons by recklessly using a military-grade nerve agent to try to murder a former Russian spy and playing “dice” with the lives of the people of the southern England town where he lived.

They were in hospital for weeks and have both now been discharged.

Fontanka said people using the passports in the names of Petrov and Boshirov travelled to Amsterdam, Geneva, Milan and Paris on multiple occasions between September 2016 and March 2018.

Police revealed further details of how they believed Petrov and Boshirov managed to sneak Novichok, which is banned under worldwide chemical weapons laws, into the country.

Gudkov’s tweet was an allusion to Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent who was accused by Britain of murdering the Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope, in London in 2006. He was freed from prison during a spy swap in 2010 and moved to the United Kingdom.

Police officers wear protective suits inside the fence of “Ashley Wood Recovery”, a vehicle recovery business in Salisbury, near where the auto of Sergei Skripal was taken on March 13, 2018.

In the nearby town of Amesbury, local woman Dawn Sturgess died and her boyfriend Charlie Rowley was sickened after they came across remnants of the poison in June.

The Indian-origin top counter-terrorism officer said a Nina Ricci “Premier Jour” perfume bottle with a specially made poison applicator was recovered by police. Her partner, Charlie Rowley, was also stricken but survived.