Sergei Skripal case: what do nerve agents do and how hard are they to make?

After days of analysis, police investigators announced on Wednesday that they believe a nerve agent was used to poison former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter on Sunday, raising questions of how it was created and how the attack was carried out.

A range of highly potent nerve agents were developed by military scientists from the 1930s onwards and a number have since been used in assassinations and terror attacks. On Tuesday, the US state department confirmed that it held Kim Jong-un’s North Korean regime responsible for the murder of his estranged half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, in Kuala Lumpur international airport last year. The Malaysian authorities have charged two women with Kim’s murder after they allegedly sprayed the nerve agent VX on his face. The two maintain they were duped into the attack, claiming they thought were being filmed for a TV prank show.

In the 1990s, the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult in Japan used VX to kill dissenters before releasing another nerve agent, Sarin, in the Tokyo subway, leaving more than 600 people in need of treatment. More recently, Sarin was used by the Syrian government in the civil war that has ravaged the country since 2011.


Source :- theguardian