Kremlin is seen hoarding nerve toxin for slays

BRITAIN’S foreign minister said Sunday that he has evidence Russia has been stockpiling a nerve agent in violation of international law “very likely for the purposes of assassination.”

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the trail of blame for the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury “leads inexorably to the Kremlin.”

Johnson told reporters that Britain has information that within the last 10 years, “the Russian state has been engaged in investigating the delivery of such agents, Novichok agents ... very likely for the purposes of assassination.”

He said “they have been producing and stockpiling Novichok, contrary to what they have been saying.”

Meanwhile, in his first comments on the incident, Putin called the poisoning a “tragedy,” but added that if the British claim that they were poisoned by Novichok were true, the victims would have been killed instantly.

Skripal and his daughter have remained in critical condition following the March 4 poisoning.

“Russia doesn’t have such means,” Putin said. “We have destroyed all our chemical weapons under international oversight unlike some of our partners.”