UNITED NATIONS, April 13. /TASS/. Moscow is looking forward to another UN Security Council meeting on the Skripal case, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya told reporters on Friday. According to him, the meeting will be "another episode of the chemical serial" following the recent debate on the alleged chemical weapons attack in the Syrian town of Douma.
"Next week we have another episode of the chemical serial, which will be Salisbury," he said. "We are looking forward to it and I am sure we will entertain you with more information on that when we discuss it," Nebenzya added.
The Russian ambassador supposed that there was the alleged Douma attack, which the West blamed on Damascus and the Salisbury incident were related. "Yes, we see and we were saying that this is not accidental or incidental," Nebenzya said. "Of course, they are related, and even today I said they are trying to put Russia in the center of all those conspiracies which they put in the center of the international discussion," the Russian diplomat noted.
Skripal incident
According to London, on March 4, former Russian military intelligence (GRU) Colonel Sergei Skripal, who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Great Britain and later swapped for Russian intelligence officers, and his daughter Yulia suffered the effects of an alleged nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury. Claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a Novichok-class nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union, London rushed to accuse Russia of being involved in the incident. Moscow rejected all of the United Kingdom’s accusations, saying that a program aimed at developing such a substance had existed neither in the Soviet Union nor in Russia.
In the wake of the Skripal incident, the UK, as well as a number of EU member countries, the United States, Canada and Australia, expelled more than 100 Russian diplomats, forcing Moscow to respond in kind.
Earlier in the week, Great Britain’s UN Ambassador Karen Pierce said that a new United Nations Security Council meeting on the Salisbury incident would take place on April 18 in the wake of a report issued by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which confirmed the United Kingdom’s findings that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been poisoned with a nerve agent.
The UN Security Council last discussed the Skripal case on April 9. While addressing the meeting, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya pointed to media reports saying that the Skripals had been offered new identities with the CIA’s help. According to him, the two may know disappear forever while they were vital witnesses in the case.
He also mentioned other strange facts and coincidences, including the hasty cremation of Skripal’s pets, the British authorities’ intention to tear down his house, the restaurant and the pub Skripal and his daughter had visited before the poisoning, as well as the denial of a British visa to Skripal’s niece.