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The chemist Vil Mirzyanov goes on trial in Moscow this week on charges
of revealing state secrets. Mirzyanov told journalists that Russia had developed
a new binary nerve gas called Novichok, despite official declarations that
the research had stopped (This Week, 8 May 1993).

The Federation of American Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs last week protested against the
Russian state prosecutor’s decision to exclude journalists from the trial.
Joel Lebowitz of the US Committee of Concerned Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs says the secrecy
‘suggests that Russia has indeed created a new group of binary chemical
·É±ð²¹±è´Ç²Ô²õ’.

Vladimir Petrenko, a former military chemist, says the authorities have
clamped down on Mirzyanov and another chemist, Vladimir Uglev, to stop other
weapons researchers speaking out. Petrenko says he and 40 other people were
‘turned into invalids’ by experiments exposing them to Novichok.