Sinister ‘Town of Chemists’ where Russia made novichok
THE disturbing true nature of the secret “closed” town in Russia where the killer novichok poison used in the Salisbury attacks was manufactured can now be revealed.
Visitors to remote Shikhany, 500 miles south-east of Moscow, are welcomed with the sinister sign: “The Town of Chemists”.
It is here where the poison used by Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov in the assassination attempt on Sergei and Yulia Skripal was created and stored.
As one of the infamous and notorious Russian closed towns, Shikhany is normally strictly off-limits.
Even Russians need to apply for official passes to visit and foreigners are completely banned. There is only one road in and only one road out.
But using a car with local number plates, an investigation team drove past a police control post and into the middle of the town.
It is bustling with military activity. Green army trucks speed by and uniformed soldiers walk the streets.
Only members of the military who work at the bases within the town limits live here.
Potent
The town is made up of three separate settlements – Shikhany 1, Shikhany 2 and Shikhany 4.
The reporting team drove around with ease up to the gates of Shikhany 2 where the chemists, some of the most brilliant minds in the world of science, developed novichok in the 1970s.
One man sitting at a bus stop on the main street said: “This is still a closed town. Even people who live and work in the town do not know about all the goings-on here. Some of it was top secret.”
There is a statue of Lenin and some of the streets are named after Soviet war heroes.
Apartment blocks are run down but there are also carefully manicured flower beds by the roadside.
Novichok is not made here any more. But it has been stockpiled somewhere in Russia – possibly still in Shikhany.
The Russian authorities realise it is such a potent weapon they have kept stocks for use for such difficult missions such as the attempt to murder the Skripals.
Mayor Andrei Tatarinov denied his town had anything to do with the Skripal attack. He said: “Claims that novichok was manufactured here, in Shikhany, are absurd. We perceive it as a lie, as a hoax.”
But pressed about chemical weapons, he admitted: “The lab used to be involved in their development but there were no chemical weapons depots here.” British expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said: “I’m very surprised you managed to get in to Shikhany and I’m even more surprised you managed to get out.
“There is no doubt that Shikhany was where novichok was produced. It’s their Porton Down.”
The former Nato commander said: “Laboratories in Shikhany were destroyed as recently as April. They were flattened. Nobody knows where the novichok is now.”
But he added: “As the East-West confrontation hots up chemical weapons become more and more important to use in towns and cities.
“Novichok is a super weapon of