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Re passport numbers, according to this site their passport numbers differed only in the last digit - 1297 & 1294, so not quite consecutive but very close, based on a report from Russian news site Fontanka. These numbers have been reported in the UK press as well.

Fontanka also telephoned several people who live in the apartment building where Boshirov is registered, discovering that the only resident at his supposed address is an elderly woman. Neighbors say they’ve never seen any man enter the apartment, but some suggested that she might have a son who never visits.

Fontanka was able to find out even less about Petrov. A man with his name and birthdate is registered as a staff member at the federal state unitary enterprise “MicroGen,” Russia’s biggest producer of immunological products. MicroGen operates nine branches nationwide, working mostly with vaccines, and reports to Russia's Health Ministry.
 
The thing with the passport numbers is more what you would expect with GRU people surely. It's just everything else they messed up with.
 
The thing with the passport numbers is more what you would expect with GRU people surely. It's just everything else they messed up with.

We have no idea if anything was messed up with.

Everything happening might be what was meant to happen. These people...and I'll let you conclude who "these people" might be, are not stupid. Not at all.
 
This is all merely a distraction. Orchestrated by whom and for what purpose, though, that’s the question!

How I can like something more than once!

I think is what I've been fumbling to say all along! There is a reason we know what we know...we've been deliberately shown it and deliberately told it...to distract us from something else.
 
Re passport numbers, according to this site their passport numbers differed only in the last digit - 1297 & 1294, so not quite consecutive but very close, based on a report from Russian news site Fontanka. These numbers have been reported in the UK press as well.

I seriously doubt the final digits' apparent proximity are significant. It's been common practice among Western governments for decades to subdivide critical ID numbers into segments and vary the segments so as to avoid being able to infer anything from the ID numbers' face values.

I strongly doubt the security-obsessive Russians would not be using a similarly sophisticated numbering scheme.

In any case, the final one or more digits in modern critical ID numbers are typically check digits used for hashing the number to check validity rather than values indicative of sequential issuance.
 
Why can this not simply be what it says on the tin?

It’s not as if it’s unknown for governments and other forms of administration to organise such operations well outside their own borders (often by proxy, admittedly). And it could be said that the deliberate undermining of the insulating effects of distance has been a traditional trademark of the darker side of Russian policy since even before the Soviet era - and, actually possibly much more relevant here, is a fundamental tenet of major crime organisations the world over.

Maybe I’m naïve – but it seems to me that there’s no more art to believing nothing you are told simply because it is what you are told than there is to swallowing everything hook line and sinker without a moment’s consideration.

Am I the only person to think that there really is a distinct possibility that one party travelled from a foreign country to kill a second party in another country and that the administrations of both nations involved are struggling because neither really has much of a clue what is going on? Is that actually really so unbelievable?

If I was pushed to place a bet then I’d say I don’t think Putin did it, but I’d say that behind all the bluster he’s just as much at sea as everyone else.
 
Maybe I’m naïve – but it seems to me that there’s no more art to believing nothing you are told simply because it is what you are told than there is to swallowing everything hook line and sinker without a moment’s consideration.

As Meat Loaf would say, you took the words right outta my mouth. I know this is the Conspiracy forum, but the alternative explanations concocted for what happened with the poisoning are a lot less believable than the official line from Western governments. Sometimes a revenge attack is just a revenge attack, it's not the first, it won't be the last. Just because you believe your own country's authorities for a change doesn't make you a sucker.
 
How can the times be exact "to the second" on two people walking past the same cctv camera ?
View attachment 11622 View attachment 11623 View attachment 11622 View attachment 11623

Why keep posting that?
Is that passport control at Heathrow?
When we returned from Prague recently, my wife and I went through the passport control system in adjacent lanes, side by side.
If it wasn't the exact same second when we were scanned, it would have been no more than 1 or 2 seconds difference.
So if the two Russian operatives were next to each other in the queue, there's nothing particularly woo about them being scanned at the same time.
 
Here's a new twist ... Two different Russian men were detained as suspects monitoring, and possibly seeking to penetrate, the Swiss lab that analyzed the poison for OPCW.

Skripal case: Russian 'spies' targeted Swiss chemical weapons lab
Two Russian men were arrested earlier this year on suspicion of spying on a Swiss laboratory investigating the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a newspaper investigation has claimed.

Swiss publication Tages Anzeiger and Dutch paper NRC said they were arrested in the Netherlands earlier this year.

The Swiss lab analysed samples from the poisoning of the former Russian double agent in the UK.
It has also dealt with suspected chemical weapons from the war in Syria.

The two men were expelled from The Netherlands shortly after their arrest, which had not been reported until now.

A spokeswoman for Swiss intelligence told the BBC that the agency had been actively involved in "the case of the Russian spies", without mentioning the laboratory at Spiez, near Bern.

But Tages Anzeiger said the Swiss intelligence agency had confirmed the findings of its joint investigation with NRC.

The report says the two men had equipment that could have been used to break into the laboratory's computer systems, and also alleged that they worked for Russian intelligence. ...

NRC said the two alleged spies targeting the Swiss lab were not the same men accused of the poisoning.

It is not clear exactly when the arrests were made. But British intelligence are said to have been involved in the intelligence operation, suggesting it occurred after the Salisbury poisonings. ...

Isabelle Graber, head of communications at the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) said the agency had "participated actively in this operation together with its Dutch and British partners". ...

The intended target of the alleged espionage is a designated lab for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

In addition to research on dangerous infections, it deals with biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons research.

In that capacity, it has examined samples from the Syrian conflict, where the Damascus government - Russia's ally - has been accused of using chemical weapons against civilians. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45522614
 
Interesting research by Bellingcat:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-...s-passport-data-shows-link-security-services/

Alexander Petrov’s passport dossier is marked with a stamp containing the instruction “Do not provide any information”. This stamp does not exist in standard civilian passport files. A source working in the Russian police force who regularly works with the central database confirmed to Bellingcat and The Insider that they have never seen such a stamp on any passport form in their career. That source surmised that this marking reserved for operatives of the state under deep cover.
 
Also from Bellingcat, their passports had GRU identifiers on them:

https://mobile.twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1040673204002533379
-------------------------------
Keen-eyed journalists at
@novaya_gazeta
noticed something we didn't in our Skripal report: the number indicated on Petrov's passport file next to "Don't release information" is the Russian Ministry of Defense. Specifically, where the GRU is headquartered.


The passport number was also issued by the "VIP" Federal Migration service (unit 770-001), which is used in sensitive or high-profile cases (such as, famously, Depardieu, as
@OldLentach
noted).
 
Because Sergei Skripal would be dead.

And we wouldn't be having this discussion. Because we wouldn't know anything about it.

I think that's a very begged question. Personally, I think the absolute infallibility of Russian intelligence services - in fact, any nation's intelligence services - is probably more a product of popular culture than of the real world. I'd say the same goes for major organised crime - and, in fact, any institutionalised system of enforcement. (I would add that the fact that many of these organisations so often seem to be in direct competion with other elements within their own system does not help matters).

Potentially professional, ruthless, devious and lethal - yes. Absolutely infallible - best left to the movies.
 
Because Sergei Skripal would be dead.

And we wouldn't be having this discussion. Because we wouldn't know anything about it.


Well Moscow didn't quite manage to kill Ukrainian politician Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko either.
That was with laboratory-grade dioxin and left him with debilitating weakness and a rather alarming complexion.
Perhaps he, Charlie Rowlie and the Skripals could get together and start a support group for survivors?
 
I think that's a very begged question. Personally, I think the absolute infallibility of Russian intelligence services - in fact, any nation's intelligence services - is probably more a product of popular culture than of the real world. I'd say the same goes for major organised crime - and, in fact, any institutionalised system of enforcement. (I would add that the fact that many of these organisations so often seem to be in direct competion with other elements within their own system does not help matters).

Potentially professional, ruthless, devious and lethal - yes. Absolutely infallible - best left to the movies.

Good post and there is a great deal in there I've already concluded.

However...there cannot be a more convoluted, obvious and traceable attempt to kill someone than this. Being seen everywhere on CCTV? Travelling publicly and openly? Staying a traceable hotel when there will safe houses in London? And for me, the biggie- spraying a hyper-deadly substance on a door handle where a gust of wind could have blown it onto you. And killed you. Transporting that stuff across the world? Why? If you don't care about being covert...then a silenced pistol of a garotte is infinitely easier and safer for you.

Or...why even do it yourself? Plenty of hitmen in the UK. Why travel all that distance - being traced and filmed at every step of the way? £20'000 job done. No mess. No ties to you. Easy.



Unless...he was never meant to be killed...



Well Moscow didn't quite manage to kill Ukrainian politician Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko either.

Even staunch anti-Russians have never made an absolute bulletproof argument that the Russian government poisoned Mr. Yushchenko. He had a lot of enemies...both within his own country and within even his own family.
 
And for me, the biggie- spraying a hyper-deadly substance on a door handle where a gust of wind could have blown it onto you. And killed you.
I think this stuff is not sprayed, so much as dispensed. It's probably got an oily, soapy or gelatinous consistency, so it stays put. So I'm guessing that not much of it gets into the atmosphere.
 
The unfortunate lady that died "sprayed the perfume on both of her wrists" according to her boyrfriend who was present.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44947162

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/cri...uised-in-perfume-bottle-on-both-a3890051.html
Do you think his use of the word was accurate?

He also said:

"It had an oily substance and I smelled it and it didn't smell of perfume. It felt oily. I washed it off and I didn't think anything of it. It all happened so quick."
 
novichok.jpg
 
Either way...it's sprayable.
By 'spray', I mean 'atomise'. I wouldn't have thought that the Novichok dispenser would atomise the Novichok into a cloud of fine droplets. That would be lethal to everyone in the vicinity.
 
By 'spray', I mean 'atomise'. I wouldn't have thought that the Novichok dispenser would atomise the Novichok into a cloud of fine droplets. That would be lethal to everyone in the vicinity.

Yeah...I don't know mate...it's liquid and it squirts/sprays...that would seem pretty dangerous...to me...wind blows liquid in the air. There was definitely concern that, for example, the area around the bench had been contaminated...

My original point, regarldess of whether it sprays or "atomises" - this is an incredibly hazardous substance...being used in an incredibly hazardous way. There are almost an infinite number of ways to kills to someone that cause absolutely minimal/nil possiblitiy potential harm to oneself.

The best one sitting 2'000 miles away after you've paid someone to do it for you,
 
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It seems obvious now that somebody wanted to make it clear that the Russian state was behind it.

Yep.

Which would be a very odd thing for the Russian state to want to do eh? :cheer:

"Look everyone it was us! It was us!" Covert services don't exactly operate like that...as a rule...unless for some very twisted reasons...
 
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