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Chemist Wil Mirsajanow: "I am very disappointed"
Photo:
DOMINICK REUTER / AFP
It is seven o'clock in the morning on the east coast of the USA this Thursday, Wil Mirsajanov is sitting in a flowered armchair in his living room and does not want to remain silent about what happened in far away Siberia.
He followed everything closely, the symptoms that Alexej Navalny showed after his poisoning, everything that could be learned about the clinical findings and his treatment in Omsk and now in the Berlin Charité.
"I'm very disappointed," says the 85-year-old chemist via Skype from his living room.
He has been fighting the chemical nerve agent Novitschok for 30 years and has campaigned for it to be placed on the list of prohibited substances in the Chemical Weapons Convention, he says.
"And now it is being used again to eliminate a critic of the Kremlin."
An early whistleblower
Mirsayanov knows more about Novichok than most people.
He was head of counterintelligence at the Moscow Institute responsible for the Novichok program.
The nerve agents were produced in a highly secret chemical weapons program with the code name "Tome" under the aegis of the institute, but not in the capital.
That happened in a cordoned off military restricted area in the small town of Schichany on the Volga, near the border with Kazakhstan.
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Collaboration: Alexander Chernyshev
