When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you may 
safely infer he is an inexact man - Bertrand Russell

How credible is it when Ben Wallace, Security Minister, says WE KNOW 
that NO OTHER COUNTRY had these agents (Novichoks).

Intelligence may lead us to believe that a country had certain 
weapons, may even, in some circumstances prove their existence, but 
how can you be sure that countries do NOT have something?

Well fact checking / researching to write the next part of this email 
turned up an article that Iran had synthesized a number of Novichok 
type agents AND reported this to OPCW (so long as the production and 
research is for the development of defensive countermeasures this is 
all allowed.  The work was partly undertaken by scientists at Defense 
Chemical Research Lab (DCRL), , Karaj, Iran.  The UK was therefore 
aware that other countries had synthesized Novichoks in the kind of 
quantities needed for poisoning as opposed to use as WMD.

http://www.spectroscopynow.com/details/ezine/1591ca249b2/Iranian-chemists-identify-Russian-chemical-warfare-agents.html?tzcheck=1,1,1,1,1&&tzcheck=1&tzcheck=1&tzcheck=1

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rcm.7757

Questions also remain as to why the Skirpals are still alive as a 
state applying its resources to this with a program of testing would 
surely have been able to guarantee the outcome.

Why would a state reveal, to what would be sure to be world 
condemnation, a highly secretive programme for the sake of a washed up old spy?

Malala Yousafzai , the Nobel laureate who also survived an 
assassination attempt, was not given a new identity,  even for the 
balance of her childhood.  According to the UK media / govt. Yulia 
Skirpal was not the intended target.  Why does she need to be hidden 
and why can she not be visited by her relative from Russia with whom 
she seemed close, and who _she_  chose to contact?

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk remains interesting (despite the fact 
that I suspect I disagree profoundly with his underlying 
politics).  The failure to show his interview by Kay Burley given so 
much boring garbage on her broadcast has all the hallmarks of the 
worst kind of censorship (rather like the lack of and distorted news 
reporting of Victor Orban's victory in Hungary which gave his 
government more than 2/3 of the seats in an historically high turnout).

What is or was the role of France in the investigation of the events 
in Salisbury?  Why has the media not enquired or publicized anything 
about this?  Is French involvement, in part responsible for the de 
facto (though not de jure) presumption of guilt, a feature of the 
Napoleonic code.

IF a party is innocent how can anyone use the fact that they can't 
explain how a crime was committed to find them guilty?

The smell is getting worse.

One para from my last email I'll repeat.

Amongst states with potential motives North Korea and Iran 
immediately come to mind.  Both have advanced scientific 
facilities.  North Korea is the ONLY state known to have used a nerve 
agent internationally ever and while they killed their target it 
seems to have been done in a very amateurish way using 
intermediaries.  It's not clear why neither the politicians nor the 
media have mentioned this when considering "patterns of 
behaviour".  In any case we know that North Korea clearly has nerve 
agents while Iran is believed to have conducted research on nerve 
agents and will likely have anything that Kuntsevich or others ever 
passed to Syria.

As before ... just for the record.

Julian