A recently suspended high-ranking Austrian diplomat is said to have passed on confidential documents on the neurotoxin Novitschok and the affair of the poisoned Russian double agent Sergei Skripal.
As the Austrian newspapers “Die Presse” and “Standard” reported on Saturday, citing court documents, the then Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Johannes Peterlik, sent the documents to a former Austrian secret service official who is said to have spied for Russia in October 2018.
In response to an AFP request, the Austrian Foreign Ministry announced that Peterlik had been dismissed from his most recent position as ambassador to Indonesia in mid-October as a result of an investigation.
Details of the allegations were not officially given.
According to media reports, the Austrian authorities had received the Novichok documents in question from the "Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons" (OPCW).
Peterlik then requested this and presumably passed it on.
The documents therefore contained information on the Novichok formula and the poison attack on Skripal in March 2018 in Salisbury, UK.
"The international cooperation in the secret service area was endangered," quoted "Die Presse" the investigators.
The investigations were therefore set in motion in the course of the investigation of the Wirecard scandal: for example, Wirecard manager Jan Marsalek, an Austrian, who went into hiding, bragged a few weeks later in London about the secret OPCW documents, whose Austrian origin was proven with a barcode can be.
How Marsalek, for his part, got the documents is apparently unclear so far.