SCIENTISTS from the secretive Chinese laboratory feared to be the origin of the coronavirus outbreak have "defected" to the West, it's been claimed.
Reports say they are working closely with American, British and European spies to tell all they know about their work at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.
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And the FBI is now said to be building a case against Beijing on the grounds the pandemic did actually begin with an accidental leak from the under-fire lab.
The revelations come in a Mail on Sunday interview with the former chief strategist to the Trump administration.
Steve Bannon, who still has strong links to the White House, said he knows defectors are cooperating to try to and "knit together what happened’ at the "horribly run" lab.
He claimed: "They are not talking to the media yet, but there are people out of the Wuhan lab and other labs that have come to the West and are turning over evidence of the culpability of the Chinese Communist Party."
Bannon, who used to serve on the US National Security Council, claimed spies are looking into the possibility the virus leaked during experiments to develop vaccines.
He said defectors are now talking to the intelligence agencies in America, Europe and the UK.
He said: "I think they have very compelling evidence. And there have also been defectors. People around these labs have been leaving China and Hong Kong since mid-February."
However, he added it will take a long time to build as case against China as "it’s not like James Bond."
Bannon claimed that it appears far too easy for killer viruses to leak out of "dangerous" labs.
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"You essentially had a biological Chernobyl in Wuhan, but the center of gravity, the Ground Zero, was round the Wuhan lab, in terms of the casualty rates," he said.
"Regardless of whether it came out of the market or the Wuhan lab, the Chinese Communist party’s subsequent decisions hold them guilty of pre-meditated murder."
The claims come after Donald Trump in April said he had a "high level of confidence" that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after seeing evidence.
He added that US authorities were "looking at it very, very strongly", saying: "We're going to see where it is – we're going to see where it comes from. There's a lot of theories. China might even tell us."
The president announced in June that he would withhold funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over their handling of the virus outbreak, in which they praised China’s attempts to “contain” the virus.
But after recent pressure from the WHO, China is to launch an investigation into claims the the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan lab.
The institute – the largest infectious disease lab in the world – is alleged to have been carrying out high-risk experiments to increase the infectivity of coronaviruses in an attempt to understand the mechanisms that might cause a pandemic.
Wuhan shot to international fame earlier in the year after it became the epicentre of the Covid-19 outbreak, which became a pandemic that has so far killed at least 560,000 globally.
Scientists believe that Covid-19 first originated in bats before spreading to humans in Wuhan, possibly at one of the Chinese city's so-called wet markets or from the lab.
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