MOSCOW, September 13. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Ministry is considering a query to the US Department of State for clarifications on the data suggesting that the US military and private contractors conducted secret experiments with people at the Richard Lugar Laboratory near Tbilisi, Maria Zakharova, the ministry’s official spokesperson told a news briefing on Thursday.
Former Georgian state security minister Igor Giorgadze released the information on the highly questionable experiments at the Lugar Laboratory at a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday. The institution in focus is officially known as the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research.
"Sovereign states and people living there, the citizens of those countries, shouldn’t turn into laboratory guinea-pigs in the course of experiments that pose risk to their lives," Zakharova said. "The Russian Foreign Ministry will request official explanations from the Department of State over the new facts presented by Giorgadze."
"These facts highlight the explicitly deplorable role of the US military assigned to the microbiological laboratory on the territory of Georgia," she said. "Russia finds the situation to be extremely troublesome because it’s unfolding in the immediate vicinity of the Russian border."
"Government officials, public activists, and experts have voiced concern on many occasions over the growth of activity of the US and other NATO countries’ military in the medical and biological spheres along the perimeter of Russian borders.
The data that Giorgadze made public at the news conference has proved correct and, on top of that, has turned out to have connection to very dangerous manipulations that defy belief, Zakharova said.
Moscow continues explaining to neighboring countries the risks that stem from a buildup of the medical/biological activity of the US military on the post-Soviet space.
"I think these countries obtained sovereignty and fought for retaining and reaffirming it so vehemently for the purposes other than biological experiments over their citizens by foreign military," Zakharova said. "And these experiments have been held there, indeed."
The Lugar Laboratory, located in the township of Alekseyevka in the area of Tbilisi international airport, opened in 2011 under a US government program. It engages in the studies of biological threats.
Georgia’s former state security minister Igor Giorgadze said his friends back at home had supplied him with thousands of pages of documents exposing highly suspicious experiments with mortally ill people at the Lugar Lab.
He said that the number of deaths with ‘undetermined’ causes, which occurred there in 2015 and 2016, gave rise to especially big suspicions.