UK poisoning

[StLucieBengal]

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/04/04/britains-foreign-office-deletes-tweet-accusing-russia-produced-salisbury-attack-nerve-agent/

UK foreign office deletes tweet accusing Russia of making the nerve agent. Could this be the first step to walking that back? If the Russians didn’t make it then it could get tense in Europe.

Quote:Britain’s Foreign Office Deletes Tweet Accusing Russia of Having Produced Salisbury Attack Nerve Agent
by Oliver JJ Lane4 Apr 201867

Getty Images / Collage

Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office have made an unusual apparent U-turn on their previously robust rhetoric on the origin of the nerve agent used to poison Sergei and Julia Skripal Wednesday, just hours after chiefs at the Port on Down defence laboratory — home to Britain’s chemical weapons research establishment — denied they had been able to isolate the origin of the chemical.


The Foreign Office Tweet, which had come on the 22nd of March as the account live-Tweeted remarks of Britains’ ambassador to Russia and said: “analysis by world-leading experts… made clear that this was a military-grade Novickok nerve agent produced in Russia”. The Foreign Office confirmed they had deleted the tweet Wednesday.



The Tweet came after Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told German television that there was “no doubt” the nerve agent had come from Russia, and he had recieved personal assurances from Porton Down to that effect.

Depite that, Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Porton Down defence laboratory told Britain’s Sky News this week that analysts had identified it as military-grade Novichok, but they had not proved it was made in Russia.

“We have not identified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific info to government who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions,” he said.

“It is our job to provide the scientific evidence of what this particular nerve agent is. We identified that it is from this particular family and that it is a military grade, but it is not our job to say where it was manufactured.”

The Foreign Office deletion u-turn comes amid heightened tensions between Russia and Western nations. Breitbart London reported in March on strident rhetoric published in Russia’s Pravda, a news organisation traditionally thought of as a Kremlin mouthpiece, which invoked previously forgotten rhetoric warning: “we are in a state of real and full-scale Cold War with all the ensuing consequences”.

AFP contributed to this article