THE HAGUE, April 5. /TASS/. Moscow continues insisting that the investigation into the poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer-turned-British mole Sergei Skripal should be transparent and involve Russian experts, the Russian envoy to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Alexander Shulgin, said.
"We insist and will be doing this so that the investigation should be truly transparent, comprehensive and unbiased and necessarily involve Russian experts," Shulgin said.
"We posed questions to the [OPCW] Technical Secretariat as these are legal questions. Very serious accusations have been made against Russia. We have circulated these questions and made them public. These are questions not only for the Technical Secretariat, but also for Britain and France…Unfortunately, we aren’t receiving any answers. This is absolutely unacceptable," he stressed.
On April 4, The Hague hosted a special OPCW meeting at the initiative of Russia on the poisoning case of Skripal and his daughter Yulia. In the run-up to the meeting, Moscow submitted 13 questions concerning the Skripal case to the OPCW Technical Secretariat and also Paris and London. The Russian permanent mission to the organization said just one answer to the questions had been received.
On March 4, Sergei Skripal, who had been convicted in Russia of spying for the United Kingdom and later swapped for Russian intelligence officers, and his daughter Yulia suffered the effects of an alleged nerve agent in Salisbury, England. Claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a so-called 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.