Miscellaneous > Non-DP Related Mysteries!

Are the basic facts of the 1993 Korovina group incident well established?

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Investigator:
I recently saw a video on Youtube about this incident, and the claim is that those who died exhibited symptoms of substances designed by the Russian (or Soviet) government to assassinate people, which may have been discarded in these kinds of locations.  Any thoughts about this idea?

Manti:
Depends a lot on the details.

I don't suppose it was recently discarded. So it must have been a fairly stable substance. In which case, the people who searched the scene, touched their belongings, etc. should have been affected as well. But there is no suggestion any of them were.


What makes this incident so interesting is that even though there is a survivor, it seemingly didn't help in finding out what happened at all. And from a high level point of view, it's very similar to the Dyatlov Incident. They ran away from their tent and died. Cause of death not crystal clear. No obvious threat at the tent.I wonder if the Dyatlov Pass Incident would also still be a mystery even if we happened to have a real survivor.

Investigator:
It seems like this hypothesis (say for Novichok, which you can read about at Wikipedia) would go something like:

The oldest (and by far strongest) male member picks up an object and while manipulating it, activates the poison (or perhaps it was activated when they were packing up that morning).  He dies quickly and then the others die in the order they were exposed and how much they were exposed to, so the survivor may not have been exposed, or it might have been too small an amount to cause symptoms (she waited quite a distance away from what would have been the "epicenter" and stayed away, whereas some of the others went back up quickly).  When she got back up there, she saw a sight from a horror movie and didn't stay for long.  Novichok is apparently dissolved/deactivated by water, so by the time rescuers found them, there many not have been enough of it to injure anyone else.

Investigator:
Are you thinking of the DPI?  I don't remember any claims about radioactive clothing in this case, unlike the DPI.  But at this point, I think the important question is, does the description of what happened by the one survivor match the poisoning hypothesis better than any other hypothesis?  That seems to be the best we can hope for now.  Making allegations against specific governments, agencies, businesses, or individuals would be premature, unless there is more evidence than I have seen to date, though of course if experts stepped forward and said it was Novichok, then it would be likely related to a Soviet program, due to the geographical location of the incident and the lack of a reason why anyone would want to intentionally harm these hikers.

Manti:
To me the symptoms don't seem like novichok but more like a corrosive gas they breathed in.

Bruised lungs, clutching their throats, bleeding from the eyes. Must have been something really strong.


Especially that Korovina herself only started exhibiting the symptoms when she went back to check on Sasha who already had the symptoms.

But all in all the description we got from the survivor / witness borders on unbelievable, and I don't know if it has been corroborated by the autopsies. It's a pretty wild thing to make up though, perhaps the substance was also hallucinogenic and she just managed to get a small enough dose to survive?

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