So, Erm, How Did You Get that Bottle?

The question that nobody seems to want to ask.

Following the attempted [correction, we regret the mistake — Emp.M.] murder of Sergey Skripal with the nerve agent “novichok” which apparently, uniquely among chemical molecules, comes with a “Made in XXX” stamped on its atoms, two further victims have been found.

One Dawn Sturgess, who died, as well as her boyfriend Charlie Rowley, who did not.

One might, if one were interested in finding out whodunnit, want to suss out the connection between the two incidents. Who knows, there might be some actionable intel hiding in there?

We’ve been digging around, and this is just about the best we’ve been able to find:

LONDON — The Soviet-made nerve agent that killed a woman and left three other people critically ill was contained in a perfume bottle, the brother of one of the victims said.

Soviet-made? That’s one remarkably stable compound, considering that the Soviet Union went out of business about three decades ago. Not to mention, again, that we weren’t aware that molecules had a “made in” stamp” on them. That’s some pretty impressive engraving skills, right there. “Soviet-invented” might be more accurate but, then again, who expects accuracy from the sub-cretinous apes calling themselves “journalists” nowadays, if you know what we mean?

Charlie Rowley, 45, and his partner Dawn Sturgess, 44, were found unconscious on June 30 in the town of Amesbury in Wiltshire, southern England. Sturgess died on July 7 and Rowley remains in the hospital in serious but stable condition. British authorities said they were poisoned with Novichok nerve agent.

Matthew Rowley [that would be one of the victims’ brother — Emp.Misha] told the BBC in an interview published Sunday that his brother, who regained consciousness last week, said he picked up a perfume bottle that contained the chemical.

Last week, the London Metropolitan Police, which is investigating the incident, said they found the source of the nerve agent — a small bottle in Rowley’s house. They would not confirm any further details about the bottle.

More’s the pity, we’d say, because personally, just how he came into the possession of said bottle and passed it on to his girlfriend without having the first clue about what was in it just might be something that might aid the investigation of the whole Skripal case, but apparently that’s not a question that anybody’s interested in asking.

Unless it had already been decided whodunnit and nobody really wanted to find out who really dunnit, that is, but that’d just be silly. Yes, we know.

Clearly the Russians, after having swapped him 8 years ago after having caught him as a double agent had second thoughts and decided that, potential consequences be damned, he needed to be put down almost a decade after he’d already spilled the beans and whatever beans he might have had left were already obsolete.

Who cares about sanctions, expulsions and such?

He was safe enough to include in a spy swap (considering he was arrested in 2004, six years before he was swapped in 2010) until he wasn’t. The most recent knowledge he had of Russian ops was 6 years old when he was swapped and 14 years old when he was “murdered to keep his mouth shut.”

Makes perfect sense. If you have the mental acuity of a fern, that is.

Listen, before anybody starts throwing aspersions around about His Imperial Majesty (not that we care, we’ve always spoken our mind based on what makes sense rather than what is convenient to whatever narrative is popular at any give time), let’s just state for the record that we don’t doubt that the former KGB thug currently the president of Russia most likely weren’t shedding any more tears over Sergey Skripal’s demise than we were over the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but we do find it interesting that said thug, after having had six years of being able to make Sergey conveniently “disappear” while in the clutches of the FSB (nobody would have ever known it happened), then released him only to allegedly murder him 8 years later.

But, most of all, we find it interesting why absolutely NOBODY finds it relevant to figure out how poor Dawn’s boyfriend accidentally ended up with a “perfume bottle” containing the same nerve agent that murdered poor Sergey and, completely innocently, happened to hand off said bottle that just inexplicably ended up at his home to her.

Are we the only one wondering why that is so manifestly uninteresting?

P.S.: As somebody with a background in chemistry, we’d also like to know if it’s really true that science has advanced to the point where you can not only identify a chemical through mass spectrophotometry, you can also state without a scintilla of doubt where it was manufactured? That is awesome, if true!