17 Facts About Novichok

Some Novichok agents are solids at standard temperature and pressure, while others are liquids.

Novichok agents were designed as part of a Soviet program codenamed Foliant.

Five Novichok variants are believed to have been adapted for military use.

Novichok was involved in the poisoning of a British couple in Amesbury, Wiltshire, four months later, believed to have been caused by nerve agent discarded after the Salisbury attack.

Novichok has been known to most western intelligence services since the 1990s, and in 2016 Iranian chemists working at a university in Tehran synthesised five of the seven Novichok agents for analysis and produced detailed mass spectral data which was added to the OPCW's Central Analytical Database.

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Novichok was the head of a counter-intelligence department and performed measurements outside the chemical weapons facilities to make sure that foreign spies could not detect any traces of production.

Novichok was referred to in a patent filed in 2008 for an organophosphorus poisoning treatment.

Rink was himself convicted in Russia for illegally selling a Novichok agent used to assassinate in 1995 a banker Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary.

Procedure of retrospective detection of Novichok type poisons in victim's tissues has been proposed recently This method is a modification of the procedure that was developed earlier for identification of sarin poisoning.

Novichok was critically injured and took ten days to recover consciousness after the incident.

Novichok lost the ability to walk and was treated at a secret clinic in Leningrad for three months afterwards.

Novichok agent was used in 1995 to poison Russian banker Ivan Kivelidi, who died three days later in a hospital at the age of 46.

Novichok was only arrested in 2006 after he returned to Russia, believing that the ten-year old case was closed.

On 12 March 2018, the UK government said that a Novichok agent had been used in an attack in the English city of Salisbury on 4 March 2018 in an attempt to kill former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Novichok told his brother Matthew the nerve agent had been in a small perfume or aftershave bottle, which they had found in a park about nine days before spraying themselves with it.

Novichok's family suspected his illness was caused by a poison put into a cup of tea he drank before the flight.

Novichok was evacuated to the Charite hospital in Berlin, Germany, the following day.