March 18, 2011, Central Public Health Laboratory was opened in Alekseevka village near Tbilisi. This facility worth of $100 million was officially designed for infectious diseases detection and epidemiological surveillance. But everything is not as obvious as it seems to be. All information about the object is classified and the facility is under special supervision of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a division of the US Department of Defense. DTRA was created after the "cold war" to oversee the destruction of huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction left in the former Soviet republics. The current focus of this structure is aimed at combating viral diseases that occur naturally or as a result of terrorist activities. This is a mystery why one of the U.S. Department of Defense agencies, but not the Ministry of Health of Georgia, is responsible for the project in Alekseevka. Despite the official name of the laboratory, the locals believe that it is actually engaged in creation of biological weapons. These fears are not unfounded – American company Bechtel National and its various subcontractors were engaged in the construction of this laboratory. The matter is that this company does not have good reputation in the world, as it was directly connected to selling poisonous chemicals to Iraq in the late 80s. Presumably, Iraq's chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein used against the Kurds in 1988 were made from those Bechtel National’s materials. It is strange that a company with such a reputation is carrying out the project in Alexeevka, isn’t it? Back to the lab again, it is worth noting that neither the Americans nor the government of Georgia allow the foreign journalists to the territory of the new object, though an ordinary visit could’ve removed a lot of questions. We only know that all the leadership posts in the laboratory are exclusively occupied by American experts, while there are just a few Georgian scientists. Giorgi Gachechiladze, Georgian Green Party leader, was among the first who attempted to draw public attention to the secret laboratory. In 2004 he held a demonstration against its construction. Gachechiladze demanded that the government should grant journalists access to the lab. But no one listened to him, or no one wanted to listen. U.S. Senator Richard Lugar - a significant figure in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the U.S. - in one of his reports on the visit to Alexeevka facility called it a "laboratory for storage of biological weapons." And yet, why did the U.S. choose Georgia for the construction of such a lab? An answer to this question might be that in Soviet times Tbilisi was one of the major research centers on studying and testing of biological pathogens. According to the newspaper "New York Times", Tbilisi’s "Biokombinat" could be easily transformed to the laboratory for the production of biological weapons in a few hours. The facility’s staff had been working hard on creating the Soviet equivalent of antibiotics since Stalin's times and, consequently, the strains of dangerous viruses were stored here. There’s an opinion among experts on biological weapons that most of those dangerous pathogens had been transferred to the new lab. Alekseevka is not the only closed biological laboratories in Georgia, there are many smaller ones. There is, for example, a biological factory near Batumi, which developed reagents for destruction of Soviet enemies’ cereal crops in Soviet times. According to some Western media, the plant is run by the UK government at the moment.
