UK calls on Russia to give details after new Novichok poisoning

London - Britain says two more people struck down with Novichok.

Britain called on Russia to give details about the Novichok nerve agent attack on a former double agent and his daughter after two British citizens were struck down with the same poison.
The two Britons, a 44-year-old woman and a 45-year-old man, were critically ill after an apparently chance encounter with the poison near the site of the March attack on ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
Britain accused Russia of poisoning the Skripals with Novichok - a nerve agent developed by the Soviet military during the Cold War - in what is the first known offensive use of such a chemical weapon on European soil since World War Two.
Russia, which is currently hosting the soccer World Cup, has denied any involvement in the March incident and suggested the British security services had carried out the attack to stoke anti-Moscow hysteria.
"The Russian state could put this 'wrong' right. They could tell us what happened, what they did and fill in some of the significant gaps that we are trying to pursue," British Security Minister Ben Wallace said.
"I'm waiting for the phone call from the Russian state."
The two Britons, who were taken ill on Saturday, were initially thought to have taken an overdose of heroin or crack cocaine, but tests by the Porton Down military research centre showed they had been exposed to Novichok.
Britain should ask Russian experts to help investigate the poisoning, Vladimir Shamanov, head of the Russian parliament's defence committee, was cited as saying by the RIA news agency.
It is unclear how the two Britons, whose background has nothing to suggest a link to the world of espionage or the former Soviet Union, came into contact with the poison, which is slow to decompose.
"The working assumption would be that these are victims of either the consequences of the previous attack or something else, but not that they were directly targeted," Wallace said.
Paramedics were called on Saturday morning to a house in Amesbury after the woman, named by media as Dawn Sturgess, collapsed. They returned later in the day when the man, Charlie Rowley, also fell ill.
Amesbury is located seven miles (11 km) north of Salisbury, where Skripal - a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who betrayed dozens of agents to Britain's MI6 foreign spy service - and his daughter were found slumped unconscious on a bench on March 4.
Novichok contamination
Health chiefs said the risk to the public was low, repeating their earlier advice given after the Skripals were taken ill that the public should wash their clothes and use cleansing wipes to wash down personal items.
But the exposure of two British citizens to a such a dangerous nerve agent will stoke fears that Novichok could be lingering at sites around the ancient English city of Salisbury.
Andrea Sella, professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London, said Novichok nerve agents were designed to be quite persistent and did not decompose quickly.
"That means that if a container or a surface was contaminated with this material it would remain a danger for a long time," Sella said.
"It will be vital to trace the movements of this couple to identify where they might have come into contact with the source."
After the Skripal poisoning, police investigators in protective hazmat suits scoured Salisbury. They may return, police said.
The March attack prompted the biggest Western expulsion of Russian diplomats since the Cold War as allies sided with Prime Minister Theresa May's view that Moscow was either responsible or had lost control of the nerve agent.
Moscow also hit back by expelling Western diplomats, questioning how Britain knows that Russia was responsible and offering rival interpretations, including that it amounted to a plot by British secret services.

A few facts about the nerve agent Novichok
Here is a brief overview of Novichok:
* First developed in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, Novichok, or "newcomer," is a series of highly toxic nerve agents with a slightly different chemical composition than the more commonly known VX and sarin poison gases.
* Novichok agents are believed to be five to 10 times more lethal, although there are no known previous uses. Moscow is not believed to have ever declared Novichok or its ingredients to the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversees a treaty banning their use.
* Novichok, the fourth generation of poison gas, was made with agrochemicals so that offensive weapons production could more readily be hidden within a legitimate commercial industry, according to US chemical weapons expert Amy Smithson.
* Publications about development and testing of Novichok in the 1990s led to US suspicions that the then-USSR had a secret weapons program and did not declare all it had in its stockpile when it joined the OPCW.
* Russia, along with the United States, once ran one of the largest chemical weapons programs in the world. It completed the destruction of a stockpile declared to the OPCW last year. The United States is in the final stages of destroying its own stockpile.
* Russia was once believed to possess thousands of tonnes of weaponised Novichok varieties and their precursors, according to a 2014 report by the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-partisan group working to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
* The chemical "causes a slowing of the heart and restriction of the airways, leading to death by asphyxiation," said Professor Gary Stephens, a pharmacology expert at the University of Reading. "One of the main reasons these agents are developed is because their component parts are not on the banned list."
* The weaponisation of any chemical is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Moscow is a signatory.