Simonyan Says Still Waiting For Pictures Of Salisbury Cathedral From Petrov, Boshirov

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd September, 2018) Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik news agency and RT broadcaster told the BBC that she was still waiting for the pictures of the Salisbury Cathedral taken by Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, suspected by London of the involvement in the Skripals poisoning incident.

Simonyan's interview with the two was released last week. Petrov and Boshirov, identified by the UK Crown Prosecution Service as poisoning suspects, told Simonyan that they had come to Salisbury on advice of their friends to simply look at the sights, including the famous cathedral.

"They actually told me that if they found those pictures [of the cathedral] they would send it to me through WhatsApp messenger. So I'm still waiting. They did not have them on them," Simonyan said.

The Sputnik editor-in-chief said she believed Petrov and Bosirov to be the two men from a video released by the UK police.

"I saw with my own eyes that they do look completely like the people on the video that was released by the British police ... As far as their story goes, I don't have any reasons to believe them: I don't know them, I haven't spent life with them, they're not my friends. But I have no reasons to believe secret services who had been lying previously," Simonyan said.

When asked if the interview with Petrov and Boshirov was just reinforcing the idea that RT was a "propaganda tool," Simonyan replied that the question of the BBC journalist seemed to her "like a typical Western propaganda because of which people actually watch RT."

"The questions were quite obviously hard for them and made them nervous and at some point they even said something like, 'We came here, we though you would support us, and you behave like we were in an investigation in a court.' And I said, 'Well I am not here to support you, I'm not your advocate, I'm a journalist'," Simonyan said.

In March, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were hospitalized after exposure to what the UK authorities said was a nerve agent. The UK authorities blamed the incident on Moscow, Russian officials refuted the allegations.

On September 5, the UK Crown Prosecution Service said that it had identified Russian nationals Petrov and Boshirov as the suspects. While UK media claimed that Petrov and Boshirov were linked to the Russian security services, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on September 12 that they were civilians.

The two denied their involvement in the Skripal poisoning in the interview with Simonyan.