Original article (in Croatian) was published on 05/05/2022
Russian state media have spread disinformation that a secret NATO biological laboratory is located in the tunnels below Azovstal in Mariupol. The claim originated from Russian internet forums and is not based on facts.
An unfounded claim suggesting that a secret NATO biological weapons laboratory is located under the Azovstal factory in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol is spreading on social networks.
“Below the Azovstal industrial zone, owned by oligarch Rinat Ahmetov, the alleged illegitimate son of former Ukrainian President Kuchma, there are approximately 24 km of underground tunnels at a depth of about 30 meters.
The tunnels feature the secret NATO project PIT-404 and the NATO Biological Weapons Laboratory. NATO officers are stationed in the PIT-404, and the tunnels are equipped with an armored bunker system.
The building houses about 240 foreigners, including NATO and French Foreign Legion officers, as well as biolaboratory staff. Their guard, funded by Ahmetov, numbers up to 3,000 people.
Biolab within the Azovstal factory in Mariupol in the so-called PIT-404 plant was built and managed by the company Metabiota, which I have already mentioned in connection with Hunter Biden, Rinat Ahmetov and Volodymyr Zelensky.
Biological weapons were tested in the laboratories in this facility. The darkest thing was that thousands of Mariupol residents were ‘guinea pigs’ in these horrific tests, and these inhumane experiments were performed mostly by Western ‘specialists’, of almost all nationalities”, blogger Goran Sijakovic wrote on his Facebook page, which has almost six thousand followers.
This Sijakovic’s post from April 12 had almost a thousand likes, and it was shared by more than seven hundred people (archived here). Similar claims have been published by various websites in our region.
It is a well-known fact that there is a network of underground tunnels in Azovstal, which serves as the last stronghold for the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol who oppose the Russian invaders. However, there is no evidence that there is any laboratory for the development of biological weapons in the Azovstal complex.
In April, the Georgian fact-checking website in English Myth Detector wrote that it was a conspiracy theory spread by the Russian media, including state-run Zvezda and RT televisions.
Georgian fact-checkers found the primary source of this conspiracy theory in a comment on a Russian Internet forum. No evidence is presented about the allegations about the alleged secret NATO biological laboratory in the tunnels under Azovstal at the forum from which they originated, and even the author of the entry claims that he is only expressing his opinion.
The theory of a secret biolab under Azovstal first appeared on April 4 on the Russian forum Strategium.ru, and the next day on the forum Pikabu.ru. The same claims then began to spread among Telegram users, from where they were taken over by Russian state media and Internet websites.
It took less than a week for this conspiracy theory to spread among social media users in Croatia. In a Facebook post, blogger Sijakovic also conveys the claim that US Colonel-General Roger Cloutier, who was recently captured in Donbas, also took part in the work of the laboratory. That is not true either.
On Cloutier’s LinkedIn profile, it is easy to find out that this American general has not been arrested. During April, Cloutier visited various NATO offices, and earlier this month – when he was allegedly “arrested” in Ukraine – he was in Turkey, which Georgia’s Myth Detector also reported.