A FORMER MI5 agent has dismissed Prime Minister Theresa May’s claims that Russia was behind the attack on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
Annie Machon who left MI5 in 1996 told Russia Today: “From the very start of this story… they need to work out what the motive was,”
“Skripal was a guy who had been caught by the Russians. He’d been tried and convicted, sent to prison, and then released and pardoned by the Russians, and sent back to the UK.
He had been debriefed – picked clean, intelligence-wise, both by the Russians… and by MI6 when he came to live in the UK. So what is the motive there?” said Machon.
“Just because the chemical weapon was supposedly developed in Russia – it does not necessarily mean the attack was state-sanctioned.”
“[Chemical] agents can be developed and used by governments all over the world,” she said.
“If this Novichok agent was developed in Russia, it doesn’t mean it’s stayed in Russia – [any more than] any of the other agents developed by Germany, the USA, or the UK have stayed in their own countries.”
“The fact that the UK facility for identifying those agents was able to identify this very quickly would indicate that they know exactly what this nerve agent is, which means that they have the chemical formula for it too. So, who knows where it came from?
“It might have been developed in Russia, but it doesn’t mean that is state-sanctioned by Russia. It’s a damaging conflation in a particularly sensitive diplomatic time.”