MOSCOW, September 11. /TASS/. Georgia’s former state security minister Igor Giorgadze has called on US President Donald Trump to investigate the experiments that the Richard Lugar Laboratory near the Georgian capital Tbilisi, also known as the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research, might have conducted over people.
Giorgadze made his appeal to the US Administration at a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday where he revealed some information on the criminal activities of the center.
"I am asking the US Administration and President Trump personally to order an investigation," he said. "The people of Georgia will be thankful to you if you deliver their country of these experiments. Meager compensations and apologies [to the families of victims of the experiments - TASS] will never make up for the lives lost."
According to Giorgadze, a whole range of experiments at the Lugar laboratory that involved fellow-Georgians had lethal finales. He had a list of about 30 people, who had taken courses of treatment at the Lugar center and had died of hepatitis C later.
Giorgadze said this information referred to just one month, namely, December 2015. "Most notably, the documents show 24 people of the group of 30 died on the same day," he said.
"The data for 2016 speaks of 30 deceased in April and another thirteen, in August," he indicated. "The highly bewildering thing is the word ‘undetermined’ in the box on the cause of death. There were no investigations as regards the causes of those individuals’ deaths."
Giorgadze said all of this happened against the background of generally encouraging results of struggle with hepatitis C in Georgia.
The former minister recalled that the Lugar laboratory appeared during the presidency of Mikhail Saakashvili.
"The Americans came to an agreement on a gradual transfer of the lab over to Georgia and the Georgian authorities are doing really much to gain full jurisdiction over it," Giorgadze said. "I do hope this transfer will take place before the yearend and the experiments involving humans will stop then."
He did not rule out the viruses developed at the Lugar center might get into neighboring countries and specifically to Russia.
"Quite possibly, the viruses may get to Russia, too," Giorgadze said. "They drew terminally ill people into those experiments, the people who clutched at a straw. Some did it for money but others simply didn’t suspect anything."
"My assistants are mulling over where to upload these documents [a multitude of which he received from friends in Georgia - TASS] in the Internet," the former minister said. "We’ll do everything in our power to bring the problem to the public eye because I want to deliver my people of the possible disastrous aftermaths."
The Pentagon’s efforts to place its medical/biological laboratories in different parts of world, including the areas adjoining the Russian border make up a subject of growing concern in Moscow.
Considering the US persistence in keeping up its reservation on the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which bans the use of germ weapons, questions about the true objectives of the US military-biological activity in the post-Soviet space give rise to legitimate questions.
The highly specific interpretation of provisions of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention [BTWC] and Washington’s claims that the ban on biological weaponry does not apply to research in this sphere amplifies the apprehensions powerfully, as it admits of the sweeping medical and biological activities that clearly stand at variance with the Convention.