The answer seemed quite obvious : Kavtun had come from Hamburg, so the Prosecutor of Hamburg had juridisction to open a criminal procedure – which they alledgedly did (I personaly can't remember if I heard at the time if one was being conducted, but it seems likely, as it is a standard procedure in such a case).That's a big if. So where is this official statement from the Hamburg Prosecutors Office, signed by the Prosecutor of Hamburg? We haven't seen it - have you? And to repeat my question a 3rd time - why are Hamburg officials getting involved in a poisoning in London? What have they got to do with it all? We haven't had an answer to that either.
Which seems a valid objection, but not fatal. Judiciary papers , as far as I can tell from personal experience, do not come with a complete official header on each page. It is possible that the file came with one or more official headed presentation page, as can be the case with official documents.There's a 2 page letter in the blog link in your post #283 purporting to be someone from Hamburg, dated 2009. It isn't written on officially headed paper from the prosecutors office so there's no way of telling the origin. It could be written by anyone anywhere & my German isn't good enough to know what it's saying. If it was actually from the Hamburg Prosecutor I would have no doubt it would be written on official headed paper.
Yes, they did agree that the Porton Down laboratory had found Novichok. It is less clear if they themselves detected it (although according to sputnik, Lavrov stated that they had). But in the statement is nowhere to be found a denegation that they identified BZ (and incidently, the assertion that they had has to be confronted with the reported behaviour of Skripal).No, the Swiss lab have not said this. They have released a statement which can be read on their twitter feed which I quoted previously. They never mention BZ. They said very little other than along the lines of 'the Porton Down statement can be relied on'. PD don't mention BZ either. Here's the Swiss lab statement:
Only OPCW can comment on this assertion. But we can repeat what we stated 10 days ago: We have no doubt that Porton Down has identified Novichok. PD - like Spiez - is a designated lab of the OPCW. The standards in verification are so rigid that one can trust the findings.
Neither am I convinced. But it does cast a doubt. The more important thing in my eyes is that I can not see a good motive for the Germans not having denied the authenticty of the letter (I personaly suspect that they agreed to its divulgation, just my 2 cent).I don't pretend to know that much about the Skripals case - there's certainly many unanswered questions. The Litvinenko case is much more cut & dried in my opinion & your references to letters supposedly from the Hamburg Prosecutor haven't convinced me otherwise.
Well, they would really be the worst assassins in the world. And in great danger of retribution from evil-mastermind-behind-all-bad-things-in-the-world Putin.Assassins could merely have failed, the occams razor solution.
And they spread enough Novichok to poison a police officer in addition of the Skripals, but not enough to kill Sergei Skripal ? The whole story appears more and more convoluted.
A message right in the middle of critical international tensions, with the consequences that a 10-year-old child could foresee ?To send a message.