Experts from the Chinese laboratory at the heart of global suspicion over the coronavirus pandemic have "defected" and are in the hands of Western intelligence, it is claimed.

Steve Bannon, who was Donald Trump ’s White House chief strategist and retains close links to the administration, said spies were building a case against Beijing on the basis the global pandemic had been caused by a leak from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.

The 66-year-old former naval officer alleged the subsequent cover-up had amounted to "pre-meditated murder".

"I know that certain defectors are working with the FBI here to try to knit together what happened" in the Wuhan institute, which he said was "horribly run and terribly mismanaged," Mr Bannon said.

Speaking to Mail on Sunday, the former investment banker said: "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. I think people are going to be shocked.

 

 

"I think that they [spy agencies] have electronic intelligence, and that they have done a full inventory of who has provided access to that lab. 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. [US intelligence] along with MI5 and MI6 are trying to build a very thorough legal case, which may take a long time. It’s not like James Bond."

And Mr Bannon also suggested the French government, which helped to build the institute, had left behind monitoring systems after Beijing shut them out of the project before it opened in 2017.

But the Chinese government dismisses claims of a laboratory leak as a ‘conspiracy theory’ and denies any cover-up. The WHO denies any complicity in a cover up.