British and American authorities have been given several chemical analyses of a substance believed to be a novichok nerve agent produced in Russia’s closed Shikhany military facility, a Russian lawyer has told the Guardian.
Boris Kuznetsov, who fled Russia in 2007, said he had handed British diplomats the police case files from the 1995 murder of a Russian banker and his secretary with a toxic substance, which scientists have identified as a product of the Soviet-designed Foliant programme.
A related nerve agent was used in the Salisbury poisoning last month.
The documents, some of which had previously been leaked by the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, were given to British diplomats in Latvia in March, Kuznetsov said. He told the Guardian he had also handed the case files to US authorities.
Among the documents, which have been seen by the Guardian, are the results of a mass spectrometry and an infrared spectroscopy of the poisonous substance, which was scraped off a telephone receiver used by the businessman Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary. Both died in agony.
The files may provide rare physical evidence about chemical weapons production at Shikhany. The British case has so far relied more heavily in public on circumstantial evidence and secret intelligence.
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