MOSCOW, April 19. /TASS/. Russia expects to receive comprehensive answers from both the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the United Kingdom on the poisoning case of former GRU Colonel Sergei Skripal and recommends London to hold off from destroying the evidence, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.
"We expect to receive comprehensive answers to our questions. The Russian side is still ready for constructive cooperation with the UK to clarify this very complicated case," Zakharova said. "We are ready to cooperate in any international legal formats and recommend London to hold off from destroying the evidence."
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The list of Russian questions continues to grow, she sad. "The OPCW report says that the laboratory had only one task - to check whether the biomedical samples contained the nerve agent found by the UK," the diplomat pointed out. "The answer may be just ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The laboratory didn’t even plan to search for other poisonous agents."
"The report says that a toxic agent was found in Yulia Skripal’s biomedical samples unchanged, which is strange," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said. "Even non-specialists understand that any substances are immediately affected by biochemical processes upon digestion, which leads to their degradation."
"It is unclear why it didn’t happen in this case. This is alien mysticism," the diplomat stated.
On March 4, former Russian intelligence officer and convicted British spy Sergei Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia, aged 33, were allegedly poisoned with a nerve agent, according to British investigators. Later, London stated that this agent was designed in Russia and blamed Moscow for being behind the incident based on this assumption. The Russian side refuted all accusations, saying that neither the Soviet Union, nor Russia had any programs for developing this agent. The OPCW confirmed information about the character of the agent in its report published on April 12, but did not identify its origin.