A dissident Russian scientist, who spent two years in prison after revealing his country's production of chemical weapons, plans to set up an organisation for Russian scientists to campaign for freedom of speech.

Vil Mirzayanov, who was released from prison a year ago after international publicity, said at the AAAs meeting in Atlanta that the authorities are still trying to silence him by suing him for 30 million roubles.

Dr Mirzayanov worked for 25 years for a large military chemical research institute in Moscow. He was accused of exposing state secrets when he revealed in October 1992 that Russia's chemical warfare industry, despite a 1989 Bush-Gorbachev agreement to destroy all chemical weapons and end their production, was producing a new, more potent weapon. He was later acquitted through "lack of evidence".

He says that his fears about Russia's stockpile of chemical weapons will remain until the international Chemical Weap-ons Convention is ratified. Otherwise there will be no guarantee that Russia is not making more weapons; and no one will be able to provide the country with the expertise needed to dispose of them safely.

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He fears that Russia has been destroying some of its chemical weapons in a "barbaric" way, for example by burning them or by mixing them with calcium chloride and pouring them out in the open.

"Now that Russia is supposedly democratic in a post-Cold War era, almost everyone has stoppped thinking of chemical weapons as a real problem that must be resolved," he said.

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Although Dr Mirzayanov has been acquitted, his institute is now suing him.

He said: "We have a new constitution which prohibits this kind of action but no one has changed. The powers want to retain a closed door to all of the scientists who are in the same situation as me. Seventy per cent of scientists in Russia work in the military complex.

"There is no organisation to discuss such human rights."