Former security minister of Georgia Igor Giorgadze has made a statement where he alleges that the US military and other private contractors might have carried out secret experiments which also involved human subjects in a laboratory facility in the country.
He is reported to have made these statements in a news conference in Moscow earlier this week, according to a report by Tass, a Russian news outlet. He has claimed that he has in his possession thousands of pages of documents that detail some of his claims. He says that they show how biologists from the US army medicine group as well as private contractors from there might have conducted secret experiments on Georgian citizens at the Richard Lugar laboratory.
The lab is called the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research, notes the report, and Russian defence experts have also said that the field of activities in this lab looks "highly suspicious".
"A whole range of experiments involving my fellow-Georgians had lethal finales," Giorgadze said, he added that there is a list of about 30 people who took treatment from the lab and later died of hepatitis C and this incident covered just one month—December 2015 and that documents show 24 people in a group of 30 died on the same day.
As for 2016, he said that 30 people died in April and another 13 in August.
About the dubious nature of these deaths, Giorgadze said the word 'undetermined' was filled in under "cause of death". There were reportedly no investigations with regards to why these people died, he said.
The former minister went on to add that he has the data related to the victims' age, gender, and date of death only. There is an opportunity to identify their names if someone wishes to, he said, notes the report.
All of this, notes the report, has happened based on the generally encouraging results of Georgia's struggle with hepatitis C, he said.
International Business Times, India, has not been able to independently verify any of the claims made in this story.
