Even Russians doubt Skripal suspects

The account by the two suspected Salisbury poisoners of an innocent tourist trip has met with even doubt in Moscow.

A video from September 12 footage by the Kremlin-backed RT news network shows the two Russian nationals identified themselves as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Picture: AFP

The account by the two suspected Salisbury poisoners of an innocent tourist trip to the city met with derision in Britain but even Moscow has struggled to find it credible.

After the men said that they visited over the same weekend in March as the nerve agent attack to see Salisbury Cathedral but had been thwarted by snow, Maria Zakharova, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, admitted that this may have raised more questions than it answered.

“The interview that we saw does not mean that a full stop has been placed on this issue, that this is some kind of ultimate truth,” she said. “I think that we should analyse all opinions and listen to all statements that are being made. That’s why I would not say that the interview dots all the ‘i’s.”

Some media supportive of the Kremlin were also sceptical. A columnist at Life News, which has links to the security services, called the interview “sketchy”.

Komsomolskaya Pravda, a tabloid supportive of President Vladimir Putin, has offered 100,000 roubles ($2050) for information about the pair, whom it referred to in quotation marks as the tourists from Salisbury.

The Kremlin said that the men’s story supported its denials of involvement in the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal. “Accusing Russia of lying after the declarations of two Russian citizens is … absurd,” Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, said.

The interview aired on RT on Thursday, a day after Mr Putin called on the men to share their testimony with the media. The pair identified themselves as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov and claimed to be sports nutritionists rather than members of the GRU military intelligence service, as alleged by Theresa May.

Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, who conducted the interview, said that she was not necessarily convinced by their account. “I don’t have any reasons to believe these people either but I have even less reasons to believe the British secret services,” she told the BBC’s Newsnight.

Simonyan said that the men had contacted her directly and set out terms. “They said that they had several conditions on which they were ready to give an interview.

“One of the conditions was that no questions would be allowed that would allow the media to track their acquaintances or their business partners or their relatives or their classmates or whomever. As they said — and this is their words not mine — that this is their first and last interview to the media ever.”

She said that the men had agreed to send her images of their visit to the cathedral but had since failed to do so. “They told me that if they found those pictures they would send them to me on WhatsApp. I’m still waiting,” she said. “I tried to call them on the phone on which they called me but it has been out of coverage.”

Online, Russians unconnected to the Kremlin cringed. Andrei Malgin, a critic of the government, said: “GRU has a poor imagination. Two tourists. Flew specially for two days from Moscow to Britain to see Salisbury Cathedral. Wow, such refined connoisseurs of gothic architecture. They went to Salisbury twice for the sake of the cathedral. But Westminster Abbey held no interest for them.”

Oleg Kashin, a journalist, questioned what the Kremlin thought. “Does it seem to them that they have proven that Russia wasn’t involved in the poisoning of the Skripals? Or do they understand how it really looks?”

Gregory Petukhov, a poet in Moscow, said: “Their acting skills are below par and they don’t seem like they bothered rehearsing the cover story.”

Mr Boshirov’s reference in the interview to the 123m height of the cathedral’s spire also attracted derision. Lizaveta Nesterova, a journalist, wrote: “Boshirov remembered the height of the spire at Salisbury Cathedral six months after his trip. What a memory! He should join the intelligence services.”

Meanwhile two Russian spies have been arrested on their way to break in to the Swiss chemical weapons laboratory that was analysing the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack, it has emerged.

The Russian military intelligence agents were intercepted in the Netherlands in March. Investigators believe that they were attempting to spy on the Spiez laboratory, which conducts tests on behalf of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

At the time of the arrests Spiez was investigating poison gas attacks by the Assad regime in Syria and the novichok attack on the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury that month. The men were identified as members of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence directorate.

After an interview with the Salisbury suspects Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov was broadcast on the Kremlin-backed RT channel, the reports surfaced of the arrests of the two unnamed Russian spies in the Hague after an operation by the British, Dutch and Swiss secret services.

The Russians were caught with hacking equipment to break into the laboratory’s computer network. NDB, the Swiss intelligence agency, confirmed that the spies were discovered in The Hague and then expelled.

A British security source confirmed the details of the reports and praised Dutch intelligence for disrupting an attempt to corrupt the OPCW investigation. “They were caught red-handed,” the source said.

The arrests were not made public at the time but Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, announced in March the expulsion of “two Russian intelligence agents working at the Russian embassy”.

The Spiez laboratory said that it was the target of hackers this year. “We have armed ourselves against this. Data has not disappeared,” Andreas Bucher, a spokesman, said.

Despite the arrests, Russia received secret information from the laboratory which it then used as part of a larger disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the OPCW’s conclusions that the poison used in Salisbury was novichok, a nerve agent created in a secret Russian military program.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, claimed in April that Moscow had received a secret analysis produced by Spiez “from a confidential source” showing that the substance used in Salisbury was BZ and not novichok. He accused Britain of producing BZ in violation of the chemical weapons convention and seeking to frame Russia, and cast doubt on the OPCW’s independence.

Ahmet Uzumcu, head of the OPCW at the time, dismissed the Russian claim. “The BZ samples did not have anything to do with the Salisbury samples,” he said. “It was solely for checking the quality of the work.”

Intelligence sources told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad that Mr Lavrov could not have received the analysis report legally.

The Times