The Chemical Agent Mystery
It was reported that efforts to treat victims were complicated because the Russian government refused to inform doctors what type of gas had been used. In the records of the official investigation, the agent is referred to as a "gaseous substance". In other cases it is referred to as an "unidentified chemical substance". Based on the gas' effects and examinations of victims, it appears to have been an FSB-made aerosol version of 3-methylfentanyl, an artificial, powerful opium-like substance. Government officials still treat its contents as a state secret.
The Russian Federation, as a member-state of the Chemical Weapons Convention, undertook "never and under no circumstances to carry out any activities prohibited to member-states of this Convention" to develop, to accumulate, to stockpile and to use chemical weapons that can cause death, temporary incapacitation, or permanent harm to humans or animals. The Convention obliges the states to fulfill the conditions of toxic chemicals' use that allow to exclude or considerably reduce the degree of injury and gravity of consequences. However, during the special operation in Dubrovka this provision was disregarded, i.e. neither the type, nor the quantity of the chemical agent helped to attain the set purpose—to neutralize the terrorists so as to rescue the hostages. (The Convention allows the use of some chemical agents like tear gas for "law enforcement including domestic riot control", but requires that "riot control agents" have effects that "disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.")
Read more about this topic: Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis
Famous quotes containing the words chemical, agent and/or mystery:
“If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch ... and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order ... by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.”
—Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen] (1885–1962)