TBILISI, May 28. /TASS/. Experts from Russia will be able to visit the Georgia-based Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research only as part of an international delegation, Diretor of Georgia’s National Center for Disease Control and Public Health Amiran Gamkrelidze said on Thursday.
"What does it mean - they will come, enter and examine every corner etc.? Russians will come to the Lugar laboratory the way representatives of other nations come," he told an online news conference. ‘We have several times invited Russians, but not them alone. We will not permit it to have only a Russian delegation. We suggest that they come as part of an international delegation," said the director of the center, of which the lab is a part.
On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a comment, saying that Russian specialists should have access to all facilities of the Richard Lugar Center when visiting the lab.
The Russian diplomatic agency noted that the mechanism of ‘voluntary assessment visits’ of the dual-purpose microbiology lab advanced by certain Western countries had nothing to do with the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.
Richard Lugar Center
Russia has repeatedly raised alarm bells over the work of the Georgia-based Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research. Opened near Tbilisi’s international airport in 2011 under a US governmental program, the center specializes in the study of biological threats. Georgia’s former State Security Minister Igor Giorgadze told reporters in late 2018 that he had evidence confirming that the lab was carrying out dangerous experiments and called on US President Donald Trump to investigate the facility’s activities. Giorgadze claimed that US military and private contractors could be engaged in secret experiments on humans there. Georgia dismissed these allegations as absurd while Moscow said it would request documents related to the lab from the United States.