What happens when evidence of a nerve agent poisoning exists in impossible dual states? Part one of a three-part report on the Dawn Sturgess inquiry examines elements simultaneously lethal yet harmless, present yet absent, sealed yet used.
A note on sources: Links presented in bold go to precise points in the YouTube feed from the Dawn Sturgess inquiry. Links that are not in bold are to supporting sources: articles and videos from mainstream news providers.
Point 1. The perfume spray that wasn’t a perfume spray
The multi-million pound inquiry into the death of the UK citizen Dawn Sturgess concluded public hearings on 2 December 2024, although further sessions — with only a select few participants — will be held in secret (sessions the Sturgess family’s lawyers will not be allowed to participate in).
A final report from the chair of the inquiry, retired Supreme Court judge Lord Anthony Hughes, is expected to be delivered at some point in 2025.
The inquiry, which was set up to investigate the circumstances leading to Dawn’s death in July 2018 — a death allegedly caused by a “military grade” nerve agent called novichok — would not have been held at all had Dawn’s daughter not mounted a legal challenge against the coroner’s decision to limit the scope of his inquest into the death of her mother.
The coroner ruled that he would not consider Russian state culpability for Dawn’s death, which was seemingly collateral damage caused by two Russian secret agents who had allegedly used novichok in an attempt to assassinate the retired Russian double agent Sergei Skripal four months previously, on 4 March 2018, in the English city of Salisbury.
After Dawn’s daughter won her challenge against the coroner’s decision to limit the scope of his inquest, the UK government converted the inquest into a so-called public inquiry so that evidence could be heard in secret.
The home secretary at the time then acted to ensure that evidence would be hidden from the Sturgess family and from the inquiry itself — without consulting Lord Hughes, the chair of the inquiry, before doing so.
Despite this unprecedented censorship, several weeks of public hearings were eventually held, with the proceedings streamed on YouTube (subject to a 10 minute delay so that any sensitive material could be redacted) during which a number of important facts were revealed about the alleged attack on Sergei Skripal, and the circumstances surrounding Dawn’s death.
There have been a couple of articles in the mainstream media summarising “what we have learnt” from the inquiry since the public hearings ended but, for whatever reason, journalists overlooked many of the important facts that emerged — or failed to give them sufficient attention.
However, at least one fact was clear before the inquiry began: a perfume spray that wasn’t a perfume spray lies at the heart of Dawn Sturgess case.
This is because the Russian secret agents allegedly used a small container disguised as a perfume bottle to apply novichok to the front door handle of Skripal’s home at around 12pm on 4 March 2018, shortly thereafter discarding the bottle in a public bin somewhere in Salisbury. There it was apparently found by Dawn’s boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, who later gave it to her in the morning of 30 June at his flat in the nearby town of Amesbury.
Exactly where and when Rowley found the bottle — if indeed he did find it — is unclear, as he seems to have no memory of doing so. He initially told police he had probably picked it up about four days before giving it to Dawn (Day 22, p117), but a senior police officer told the inquiry he thought Rowley had in fact picked the bottle up shortly after it was discarded, and had then held onto it for nearly four months — including when he moved from Salisbury to Amesbury in May (Day 22, p165) — before giving it to her.
Despite the fact he could not remember where he found the bottle, Rowley had a clear memory of the condition it was in. He said it was boxed and sealed in plastic packaging, as if new. He also said the liquid in the bottle was oily and odourless — something he discovered when he spilled some of the substance on himself after opening the box.
He said he gave the bottle containing the remainder of the liquid to Dawn as a gift believing it was perfume, even though it did not have a fragrance.
The bottle’s long-nosed pump nozzle was apparently designed to squirt its contents directly onto a surface rather than atomise the liquid into an aerosol mist, as would be expected with a genuine perfume spray. The nozzle bears a striking resemblance to the nozzle used on a throat spray called Teva Jox, but it was in fact supposedly highly engineered to protect the Russian secret agents as they applied novichok to Skripal’s door.
Rowley said the pump nozzle was packaged separately from the bottle inside the box, and it was in the act of attaching the pump nozzle to the bottle that he spilled some of the liquid on his hands.
The first point to be made about the events leading to Dawn’s death, and the inquiry into its circumstances, concerns this nozzle and how it worked.
It has become an important part of the narrative of Dawn’s death that she sprayed the liquid in the bottle onto her skin, and this is what killed her. This simple action can be easily envisaged and understood by anyone who has seen or used a spray perfume bottle in their everyday lives.
But this is pure suggestion — at best, a very sloppy shorthand to describe what she apparently did; at worst a deceptive use of language that evokes an easily understood behaviour to disguise problems with the narrative of Dawn’s poisoning that begin at the moment she allegedly poisoned herself.
The reality is an aerosolised mist of “military grade” nerve agent would present an extreme risk of injury or death to anyone attempting to use such a neurotoxin to contaminate any kind of surface, unless they were wearing full protective equipment of the kind that the UK authorities were later seen wearing while investigating the Salisbury and Amesbury events.
For this reason it was reported that the novichok was, in fact, smeared onto Skripal’s front door handle, rather than sprayed onto it. But appealing to the popular understanding of how real perfume bottles work, it was also widely reported that Dawn sprayed the liquid onto her wrists believing it was perfume as it superficially appeared to be, even if it did not smell.
The sloppy and inaccurate — if not deceptive — suggestion that the bottle of nerve agent functioned and was used like a perfume spray was accepted and used by the inquiry, and it was described as such throughout the proceedings, including by Adam Straw KC (a barrister representing the Sturgess family) and Lisa Giovannetti KC (representing the police).
For example, the suggestion that the bottle was a spray was made by Straw in his opening remarks to the inquiry on Day 1 (p87): “Dawn sprayed the substance on herself”, and the same suggestion was repeatedly made by Giovannetti in her closing remarks on Day 24 (p109): “The… applicator … was designed [to] provide some protection to a user spraying the bottle’s contents away from themselves — but sadly of course not to Ms Sturgess who unwittingly used it to spray poison directly onto her skin.”
The inquiry further reinforced the popular understanding that the bottle functioned as a spray by introducing the detail that Dawn had probably also sniffed or breathed in the military grade nerve agent that killed her at the same time as spraying herself with it, meaning that she suffered what an anonymous government toxicologist referred to as ‘FT49’ said would have been “multi-route exposure” (Day 9, p122).
This apparent multi-route exposure was used to explain why she was affected so quickly.
The testimony of ‘FT49’ on this point was supported by other expert witnesses who appeared before the inquiry.
On Day 11 (p62) of the proceedings Professor Guy Rutty, “the UK’s leading academic forensic pathologist” — told Lord Hughes that Dawn had experienced symptoms very rapidly because she had “probably” inhaled aerosolised particles of novichok, as well as applying it to her skin.
“There would also potentially be just some atmospheric liberation of it,” Rutty said. “I think it’s probably highly likely that it was also in essence breathed in nasally or orally.”
This spray that was not a spray is the first example of the theme of this article: the strange contradictions that run through the narrative of the circumstances leading to Dawn’s death, and the oddly indeterminate properties of the “military grade” nerve agent novichok in particular.
The novichok narrative presents a nerve agent that defies its own nature: a substance lethal in microscopic amounts yet casually wiped on jeans; a toxin requiring full protective equipment that restaurant staff encountered without harm; a poison capable of killing thousands that left a cat unharmed for days in a contaminated house.
The quantum state of novichok — simultaneously lethal and yet harmless — sets the pattern for every aspect of this case, including Dawn’s death.
Dawn apparently began to experience symptoms within 15 minutes of spraying novichok on her skin. She was taken to hospital that morning but had suffered catastrophic brain damage. She died nine days later when the decision was made to turn off her life support.
Rowley also sniffed the liquid in the bottle, which is how he knew that it did not have much of an odour, and accidentally poured a significant quantity on his hands. But unlike Dawn he was not affected for hours — a point we will examine in more detail in a moment — and he recovered.
Dawn’s death was the only fatality allegedly caused by the novichok supposedly used by the two Russian secret agents in their apparent attempt to kill Sergei Skripal in Salisbury on 4 March 2018.
Sergei and his daughter Yulia, who was visiting him from Moscow at the time, both allegedly touched the poison that the secret agents had supposedly applied to his front door — and both Sergei and Yulia seemingly received a dose large enough to incapacitate them together on a bench in Salisbury city centre, a few hours after their alleged exposure.
Although they were initially believed by paramedics and doctors to have taken an opiate — initially thought to be the powerful synthetic opiate fentanyl — and treated accordingly, both Sergei and Yulia survived — as did Charlie Rowley when, months later, he “tipped” novichok onto his hands while attaching the pump dispenser to the supposed assassination weapon.
A police officer, Nick Bailey, also apparently became ill after having somehow being exposed to the nerve agent while investigating Skripal’s house in the early hours of Monday morning. He too survived exposure to what was said to be a lethal poison.
To the reader: what follows are 11 more significant points from the Dawn Sturgess inquiry that outlets such as the BBC did not go into in their coverage, still less analyse in context.
As you read through them, observe how the supposed extreme toxicity of the nerve agent becomes flexible or adaptable to the over-arching narrative of a deadly Russian chemical weapon attack on UK soil.
At several points, you will see novichok presented as a toxin of terrifying lethality: a weapon of mass destruction. But at other — often simultaneous — points you will see how it was evidently not lethal to victims, bystanders, first responders or even animals.
The extreme duality or cognitive dissonance around the narrative considered in this article, satirically entitled “Schrödinger’s novichok”, should become clear throughout.
Let us move on to the fate of Skripal’s cat.
Point 2. The poisoned cat that wasn’t poisoned
Sergei Skripal had a pet cat called Nash van Drake as well as two guinea pigs, and after Sergei was taken to hospital following his alleged exposure to novichok a Salisbury veterinarian, who had cared for the animals for years, apparently contacted police with concerns about their welfare.
But it seems this vet’s concerns were not acted on by the police as they examined Sergei’s house, despite claims to the contrary at the inquiry.
“Every time we [the police] were in the premises we were trying to care for the animals but the cat was particularly stressed by our presence,” Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command, told the inquiry on Day 15 (p39) of proceedings.
The police had apparently not initially been aware that the front door was the source of the alleged novichok contamination.
“It is clear that Sergei Skripal’s house was not regarded as crucial to the investigation, or a potential health risk, until several days after the incident,” the BBC reported on 28 March 2018, and a local BBC Wiltshire reporter recalled police “with no or minimal protective clothing going in and out of that front door” two days after it was allegedly contaminated.
Once the police were aware that the door handle was the alleged source of the neurotoxin, however, they became concerned that the house and the cat inside had been contaminated: possibly by their own movements.
The cat had somehow survived inside the house up until this point, although it had reportedly become severely malnourished. The police seemingly, therefore, decided that the cat had to be destroyed for its own good.
“Subsequently we knew the house was contaminated,” Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry (Day 15, p39). “So for wellbeing reasons associated to the cat and its condition and the fact that it was likely to have been contaminated, the cat had to be euthanised for its welfare.”
“Was there in truth any prospect of removing the animals from the house?” Cmdr Murphy is asked by Andrew O’Connor KC, counsel to the inquiry.
“I do not believe there was any prospect of them ever coming out of the house, no,” Murphy replies.
Murphy then says that the guinea pigs “died of natural causes in the house”, although it was reported at the time that they had died of thirst.
The bodies of the animals were incinerated at nearby Porton Down, the UK’s chemical weapons research facility also known as the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). This was done immediately “over fears they may have been contaminated with the deadly novichok nerve agent”.
But just how deadly was it? What would happen, for example, if you wiped some of this substance on your jeans after spilling it on your hands?
Point 3. The toxic trousers that took their time
Like spraying perfume on your wrists and rubbing them together, wiping your hands on your trousers after you have spilled liquid on them is a natural action people can easily envisage, and this is what Charlie Rowley apparently did.
But as we know, what he casually wiped on his jeans was not an ordinary liquid.
The background leading to the point where Charlie Rowley apparently wiped novichok on his jeans needs to be explained for its significance to become clear. This background information about Rowley’s health, lifestyle and witness statements as they were delivered to the Dawn Sturgess inquiry will also give context to some of the other points we will come to.
As we have seen, Rowley was unable to recall where he found the bottle of novichok that allegedly killed Dawn and it is purely a suggestion that he found it in a bin because he was in the habit of “bin diving” — that is, scavenging through public rubbish containers looking for items to sell.
Part of the reason Rowley’s memory is so poor may be the long-term effects of his exposure to novichok. But the inquiry heard that he was also a self-confessed alcoholic and heroin addict who took large amounts of drugs and consumed very large quantities of alcohol almost daily, including on the day before he gave Dawn the bottle that allegedly killed her.
As well as being unsure where he supposedly found the bottle, Rowley was also unable to recall when he found the bottle, again apparently because of his frequently intoxicated state.
Possibly for these reasons, Rowley did not give testimony to the inquiry in person and was not required to answer questions from the lawyers involved — despite the fact that he is the key witness upon whose evidence the investigation into the circumstances of Dawn’s death depends.
His crucial account was presented only through transcripts of police interviews, which were partially read out during the proceedings. The unclear and often conflicting nature of his testimony then became the subject of speculation on the part of the inquiry’s lawyers and participants such as Cmdr Murphy.
On Day 3 (p55) of the inquiry, lead counsel O’Connor drew attention to a passage in an interview transcript where the interviewing officer asks Rowley: “How often would you take heroin?
“Mr Rowley says, ‘regularly’.”
O’Connor continues: “[Rowley] is asked a question on what he means by that, and he says daily.”
On Day 10 (p46), police officer Eirin Martin testified to the inquiry that Rowley was not only a heroin user but also “a well-known drug dealer” in the Salisbury area.
On Day 22 (p70), part of a transcript of a police interview where Rowley was asked about his alcohol consumption was read out by O’Connor.
“The officer says: ‘Do you recall what you had had to drink before you found the box?’,” O’Connor says.
“Mr Rowley says, ‘Probably quite a lot.’
“Then he is asked: ‘Okay. Charlie, what’s quite a lot in your opinion?’
“He says: ‘Probably like three bottles of wine, about four bottles of beer.’
“Mr Rowley explains nine per cent beer.
“And the officer says: ‘Okay. And you believe that [is] the reason for you not remembering.’
“Mr Rowley says: ‘“Well, not saying that’s why I don’t remember, because that’s a poor excuse, I’m just saying I was probably drunk.’”
Rowley was so drunk the day before Dawn collapsed at his flat that he could not remember them making the bus journey from Salisbury, where they had spent the day, to Amesbury that evening. Asked by the police: “How do you know that you definitely got home on that… night?” Rowley simply replied: “Because we woke up in Amesbury the next day.” (Day 3, p54)
Later on Day 22 (p157) of the proceedings, Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry: “[I]t’s really important [to understand] … that I don’t think we’re ever actually going to know where Charlie found the novichok.”
There is in fact no evidence that Rowley found the package containing the bottle at all. Once again, this is purely a suggestion. All we know is the bottle apparently turned up in his flat in Amesbury on 11 July, three days after Dawn died.
A written statement — undated and unsigned — from now-retired Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Philip Murphy, who was in charge of the investigation into the alleged poisonings of Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess but did not give evidence to the inquiry in person (and was, somewhat confusingly, represented at the inquiry by Cmdr Dominic Murphy of Counter Terrorism Command) says that when Rowley was shown pictures of the box and its packaging he initially “did not recognise it and did not think that was the box with the bottle in it” (p25, paragraph 111).
The bottle was seemingly found on a kitchen work surface after police had been searching the property for at least five days.
Many people had been at Rowley’s flat in the days before Dawn collapsed there, and there is a suggestion it had been “cuckooed” — that is, taken over by local drug dealers and addicts who lived a similar lifestyle to Rowley’s.
It is just as plausible that one of the people who frequented the flat left the bottle in the kitchen, as it is that Rowley had picked up the bottle in Salisbury on or around 4 March 2018 and unknowingly brought it with him when he moved from Salisbury to Amesbury on 18 May 2018.
There is no evidence for either of these possibilities — they are both purely suggestions — but it makes the point: Rowley’s account of finding the bottle is unreliable. In a legal context it could be said to lack probative value.
It bears repeating that the inquiry depends almost entirely on Rowley’s testimony for a critical aspect of the case it is investigating: how Dawn Sturgess came to “spray” herself with novichok — allegedly discarded by Russian secret agents in Salisbury — and how her death was a consequence of their alleged attempt to kill Sergei Skripal.
It also bears repeating that Rowley never appeared before the inquiry.
“[W]e had planned for Mr Rowley to give evidence … and, of course, had he done so he would have been able to cover those matters in sequence,” O’Connor told Lord Hughes early in the proceedings (Day 3, p50). “For various reasons, he isn’t now giving evidence and is timetabled to appear… towards the end of the hearings in November.”
But this “timetabled” appearance didn’t happen. For whatever unspecified reasons, Rowley did not give personal evidence to the inquiry at any point.
Despite Rowley’s inability to recall important details about the bottle, such as where and when he found it, there are some details about the bottle and what he did with it that Rowley was apparently able to remember very clearly at the time. He gave an account of these details to ITV News — and because of his account to ITV they became details that the inquiry had to address.
These are the details already mentioned: Rowley’s statements that the bottle was boxed and sealed in plastic, with the nozzle packaged separately from the bottle, and that he “tipped” some of the liquid in the bottle onto his hands while attaching the nozzle to the bottle before giving it to Dawn.
As we know, Dawn seemingly experienced symptoms within 15 minutes, was horribly injured, and died — but it was several hours before Rowley was affected by the same poison that apparently killed her, and he survived.
Rowley’s survival has been explained because he said he quickly rinsed the liquid off his hands under the tap (Day 3, p80). However, a Counter Terrorism Police document presented to the inquiry states that before washing his hands Rowley initially wiped them on his jeans.
“His first instinct,” the document says, “is to wipe his hands on his jeans, front and back (‘my hands were covered with the stuff’).”
The document provides a diagram of Rowley’s jeans with readings of the supposed levels of novichok contamination found on them (see page 9 of the PDF document here: ‘Rowley spills nerve agent on his hands and wipes them on his jeans’).
This detail is significant to the question of the toxicity of novichok because the contents of the bottle were supposed to be so deadly that they were capable of killing thousands of people — an assertion made many times in the UK media over the years, and repeated by MPs in the UK Parliament.
This assertion that the contents of the bottle could potentially have killed thousands of people was also made to the inquiry by the anonymous expert ‘MK26’ — “the lead DSTL scientific advisor to the police investigations into the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings” — who said in written testimony that “the quantity of liquid remaining in the bottle is estimated to be sufficient to provide thousands of lethal doses in humans”.
During the inquiry, novichok was compared to the British-developed nerve agent VX, believed to be the most deadly nerve agent known to man at the time — 170 times more deadly than sarin.
Novichok is supposed to be five to eight times more lethal even than VX.
On Day 9 (p94) of the inquiry the anonymous expert ‘FT49’ — “a specialist in the fields of toxicology and pharmacology” who works at “DSTL Porton Down within the chemical, biological and radiological division” — said: “The calculated human lethal dose of VX is in the order of 10 milligrams on skin, which is equivalent to eight or so grains of sand.”
O’Connor goes on to ask ‘FT49’: “Noting the sort of public claims that Novichok is even more lethal than VX, it follows if that were right then an even smaller amount could be fatal; is that fair?”
‘FT49’ replies: “Yes, indeed, yes. That’s fair.”
Ten milligrams is 0.01 of gram, so if novichok was twice as deadly as VX a lethal dose would be 0.005 of a gram. But novichok has been reported to be more deadly even than ‘FT49’ told the inquiry. ‘MK26’ said a fatal dose on the skin would be equivalent to “a third to a sixth of a grain of salt” (Day 16, p34), and in July 2018 the British professor of environmental toxicology Alistair Hay told US-based broadcaster NPR that a lethal dose would be “maybe 50 to 100 micrograms” — that is, 0.00005 of a gram or a tiny fraction of a grain of sand.
We shall hear from Prof Hay again later, but to recap: Rowley supposedly spilled some of this extremely toxic substance on his hands and wiped them on his trousers before washing his hands under the tap. He then gave the bottle containing what remained of the liquid to his partner, who he said became seriously ill very rapidly after she was allegedly exposed to the nerve agent.
But when Dawn was rushed to hospital in Salisbury that morning, Rowley remained in Amesbury. He was apparently unaffected by the poison. He picked up his Methadone prescription at a chemist, and then went to a free hog roast event hosted by a nearby Baptist church.
The novichok he was exposed to and had wiped on his trousers apparently took significant effect on him only after he went back to his flat with his friend Sam Hobson later that afternoon. So far as we know, no-one he came into contact with over the course of that day was injured or became ill.
This includes Hobson, who Rowley was initially convinced had poisoned him while they were in his flat. Hobson was apparently ruled out as a suspect on the basis of his movements, as recorded by his mobile phone data — and Lord Hughes suggested that Rowley was simply confused.
DCI Murphy’s written statement says (p14, paragraph 64): “[Rowley] kept referencing Sam Hobson particularly [during police interviews on 9 and 10 July 2018]. Sam Hobson had been nominated as a significant witness and we already had an account from him and I also asked officers to obtain a warrant to access his phone data to corroborate his movements.
“Ultimately, there was no intelligence or evidence to suggest his involvement in the poisoning.”
“Sam Hobson was the person that Charlie was with when he fell ill in Muggleton Road, so, sir, he was particularly focused on Sam Hobson being responsible,” Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry on Day 22 (p15).
“Yes, no doubt the explanation is confusion, but he was thinking in his head that he had been poisoned by Sam,” Lord Hughes replies.
“But it appears that … there was no evidence or intelligence to support that suggestion,” O’Connor says.
“Yes and that’s subsequently shown to be the case as well,” Murphy replies.
And that’s as much curiosity as the inquiry showed about Sam Hobson.
The inquiry also showed a marked lack of curiosity about important details contained in Professor Guy Rutty’s pathology report on the drugs that were found in Dawn’s system after she collapsed.
Point 4. The drugs detected in undetectable amounts
As with the point about Rowley wiping novichok on his jeans, the fact that Dawn Sturgess was found by the pathologist Prof Rutty to have taken recreational drugs before she died may not seem to be significant at first, but once again we need to look at the context.
An important aspect of the inquiry from the point of view of the Sturgess family was to clearly establish that, unlike Rowley, Dawn was not a drug addict and was not known to the police as a convicted drug user or dealer.
There is no question that Dawn was an alcoholic and “suffered from a long-term dependence on alcohol, which limited her ability to work and affected her personal life”, as the inquiry heard (Day 3, p24) but, insofar as alcohol is distinguished from illegal drugs, she was not an addict.
This was important to the Sturgess family because Dawn had previously been described as a drug addict in Wiltshire police documents, and at the start of the inquiry’s proceedings the police issued an apology for doing so.
“There [were] reasons to suspect that [Dawn] may have become unwell due to her association with drugs,” Deputy Chief Constable (DCC) Paul Mills, representing Wiltshire Police, told the inquiry (Day 2, p47). “But notwithstanding that, there was no police intelligence that she was a drug user and in relation to that I would like to, on behalf of the Chief Constable and Wiltshire Police, apologise for that internal error to the family. I can only try and understand the impact of that further to their loss.”
Nevertheless, as DCC Mills indicated in his apology — and as was the case with Sergei and Yulia Skripal — a provisional diagnosis of the paramedics who went to Rowley’s flat on the morning of 30 June 2018 to respond to Dawn after she collapsed was that she could have taken a drugs overdose. In the context of her relationship with Rowley, this does not seem unreasonable.
One of the paramedics, Fred Thompson, testified to the inquiry that he gave Dawn the drug Narcan [nalaxone, an antidote to opiates] “because [her] eyes were initially pinpoint [and this was] to rule out any form of opiate overdose” (Day 5, p18). This treatment, he said, had no effect.
However, the paramedics were principally concerned with the fact that when they arrived at the Amesbury flat Dawn was in cardiac arrest, and their primary focus was on her life support and resuscitation.
At one point, while his colleagues attended to Dawn, Thompson took the opportunity to ask Rowley about Dawn’s medical history.
“I took myself away from the clinical side of the resuscitation and made a point to go and speak to Charlie to get a more detailed, in-depth history and past medical history of Dawn,” Thompson told the inquiry. “[This] would enable us to build the bigger picture of our treatment options and likely causes of the cardiac arrest that we were dealing with at the time.”
“What did Charlie tell you about Dawn’s medical history?” Émilie Pottle KC — another counsel for the Dawn Sturgess inquiry — asks Thompson.
“He couldn’t recall much of the past medical history from any conditions or diseases, sort of things like asthma, diabetes, he couldn’t remember much of that,” Thompson replies. “But he did say from a recreational point of view that Dawn was not an illicit drug user and she was alcoholic and never touched drugs.”
Rowley was either lying about this or ignorant of what kind of drugs Dawn had been taking, because Prof Rutty’s report showed there was evidence from Dawn’s urine sample — taken on 30 June at 11pm, the evening of the day she was admitted to hospital — that she had taken cocaine. The sample showed traces of cocaine and benzoylecgonine — a signal chemical created by the body as it processes cocaine in the liver, known as a metabolite.
Benzoylecgonine is not a metabolite that remains in the body for very long. It is generally detectable in urine samples up to four days after someone has taken cocaine, or 10 days in heavy users.
It seems unlikely that Rowley did not know Dawn had taken cocaine, and quite possible that he had been her supplier. The inquiry heard that “Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were in a happy and committed relationship for approximately 16 months prior to her death” (Day 3, p24); the inquiry also heard that Rowley was known to the police not only as a dealer of heroin, but also of crack cocaine (Day 4, p91), and that he had “supplied drugs from [Dawn’s] address in Salisbury” (statement of DCC Paul Mills, p15, paragraph 40).
It is worth mentioning that this was not the first time Rowley had been involved in circumstances leading to the death of a girlfriend. A police document presented to the inquiry showed that almost exactly two years earlier Rowley’s girlfriend at the time, Natasha Davis — a convicted drug dealer herself — had died of an overdose while he was present.
“Rowley did not call for medical assistance for Natasha when she overdosed,” the document states. “Rowley was aware she had taken too much but put her to bed where she died.”
The fact that Prof Rutty found benzoylecgonine in Dawn’s system is significant, but not because it showed she had taken cocaine. The significance lies in the fact he was given the levels of benzoylecgonine in her system by the laboratory in Birmingham that analysed her urine samples. Because these levels were low, Rutty was able to determine that Dawn had taken cocaine some days previously, not immediately before she collapsed.
Remarkably, this was almost the only drug or metabolite identified in Dawn’s samples that Prof Rutty was given quantitative information about.
The Birmingham laboratory analysis showed that Dawn had a large number of other drugs in her system — for example, nicotine and its metabolite cotinine — but in every other case Prof Rutty was not given the levels at which they were found to be present. He was merely told that they were there. The exceptions were benzoylecgonine and, to a limited extent, the anti-depressant mirtazapine and the sedative zopiclone, which Dawn had been prescribed not long before and were found to be present at high levels.
Prof Rutty went into more detail about this during his appearance before the inquiry (Day 11, p43).
“The test that came back from Birmingham did not provide detail about the amount of drugs found, simply identifying presence?” O’Connor asks Rutty.
“That’s correct, sir,” Rutty replies.
“But there is a little more to say, is there not, which you have recorded in the next part of your report?” O’Connor says. “First of all, the report that came back from Birmingham referred to the fact that the benzo — sorry, you’re going to have to help me with that word.”
“It’s the metabolite of cocaine,” Rutty says.
“How do you pronounce it?” Lord Hughes asks.
“I can’t pronounce it myself, to be honest with you,” Rutty replies, as the inquiry’s lawyers and barristers are seen to laugh on the YouTube stream.
“No, I’m not surprised,” Hughes says, smiling. “Anyway, it’s the metabolite of cocaine?
“Yes,” Rutty replies.
“Exceptionally, the report does indicate a level for that drug and… the opinion expressed [by] Birmingham [was] that that level did not suggest recent use, yes?” O’Connor asks Rutty.
“That’s correct, sir,” Rutty replies.
“That’s one exception to the quantification point,” O’Connor says. “Then, secondly, you have recorded that the report from Birmingham also stated that the mirtazapine … and zopiclone show large peaks suggesting recent use or high dose … to that extent there’s a start of quantifying them, but there is no scientific quantification provided there either.”
“Yes, it’s just making an observation of what they’re seeing … they’re just noting that … there’s a high peak there, but unfortunately it doesn’t provide any further information,” Rutty replies.
The Birmingham laboratory that analysed Dawn’s samples was named by Rutty as the “Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospital NHS Trust laboratory”. This was almost certainly City Assays, a specialised toxicology laboratory that is part of the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospital NHS Trust and that provides screening services to NHS hospitals around the UK that need to identify drugs of abuse.
To do this, laboratories like City Assays use a process called liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, an extremely sensitive technique that can find tiny traces of drugs and their metabolites both qualitatively and quantitatively in urine samples — which is to say, Prof Rutty should have been informed about the levels of all the drugs found in Dawn’s system.
Furthermore, if Dawn’s samples were properly stored, Rutty could have been provided this missing information through a new set of tests months or even years later. Why he was not given this information is unclear given its significance, his role as a pathologist, and his seniority. He cautiously reserved his right to change his view if the data was made available to him.
“I would advise that a further statement considering the quantification … of any drug identified … is sought from the toxicology laboratory where the tests were undertaken,” Rutty said in a signed statement for the inquiry that he prepared in July 2024 (p13, line 407). “In the event that such a statement is prepared and the quantification results are released … then I would request sight of these documents.”
The extreme sensitivity of the kind of devices that were used to identify the drugs in Dawn’s system is something we shall return to when we look at the claim that the two Russian secret agents left behind traces of novichok in the London hotel room where they stayed.
Clearly hampered by the lack of quantitative information about the drugs that Dawn had taken — but seeking to understand if any of these substances could have contributed to her collapse and cardiac arrest — Rutty told the inquiry that he ruled out the drugs found in her system that he believed had been given to her by the paramedics who responded to the flat in Amesbury, or by doctors after she was taken to hospital in Salisbury.
“I have revisited the hospital notes and have identified … the drugs [that were] given to Dawn Sturgess at therapeutic dosages, post collapse and cardiac arrest, as part of her treatment,” Rutty’s statement reads (p11, line 354). “This would account for their presence within this test.”
Having eliminated the drugs that he believed had been given to Dawn as part of her treatment, Rutty was left with only two drugs to consider as potentially causing or contributing to her collapse: the anti-depressants zopiclone and mirtazapine.
“Based on the information that has been made available to me the only two drugs which need to be considered as to whether they could have caused the collapse of the deceased are the zopiclone and the mirtazapine,” Rutty’s statement reads.
Rutty goes on to state that he does not believe an overdose of zopiclone would cause a sudden cardiac arrest even in combination with alcohol, and he notes that mirtazapine “in excess can… cause central nervous system depression”. However, he is careful to point out that without the quantification results — which he implies should be available — he is unable to draw firm conclusions about whether or not these two drugs contributed to Dawn’s collapse.
“I can make no further comment with regards to these two drugs as I do not have the quantification results,” Rutty’s statement continues. “I do not know whether despite the high peak the level of drugs were within the quoted therapeutic ranges, all be it [sic] at the upper end, or whether they were within quoted toxic ranges.”
Apart from these two drugs, there was another drug identified in Dawn’s test results that could have contributed to or caused her collapse — but Rutty eliminated it from his analysis because he knew it had been given to her as part of her treatment: fentanyl. The inquiry heard that Dawn was given fentanyl when she arrived at hospital (Day 10, p167).
Fentanyl is an anaesthetic used in a medical context but, as we know, it is also a drug of abuse: the same drug that paramedics and doctors initially believed the Skripals could have taken recreationally, leading to their collapse. Police Inspector Marcus Beresford-Smith told the inquiry he also initially believed that fentanyl could have been the cause of Rowley’s collapse when he attended the Amesbury flat on the evening of 30 June, possibly because it was from a “bad batch” (Day 5, p181).
The inquiry failed to clarify this critical point. Dawn could have taken fentanyl before collapsing, but without knowing the levels at which it was found in her system there was no way for Rutty to find out. In the absence of quantification results Rutty decided fentanyl could only have been given to Dawn as part of her treatment after her collapse, but he had no real evidence to support that decision.
Questioning the cause of Dawn’s cardiac arrest and death was not part of the inquiry’s remit. The determination had already been made that she was killed by novichok disguised as perfume in a boxed and sealed presentation pack. How and why it came to be sealed, however, was a problem.
Point 5. The portable heat sealer without a purpose
As we know, Rowley told ITV News that the bottle he gave to Dawn had been boxed and sealed in plastic, and that he had opened the package and attached the pump dispenser to the bottle before presenting it to her.
The fact that the bottle had reportedly been boxed and sealed in plastic gave rise to speculation in the media that the bottle that was found at Rowley’s Amesbury flat was not in fact the bottle that had been used to contaminate Skripal’s front door, and was instead some kind of back-up weapon that was not required by the Russian secret agents and abandoned.
This possibility was considered by the inquiry, although Cmdr Murphy said he had a “strong assessment” that the bottle that was found in Amesbury was the actual weapon used to contaminate Skripal’s door (Day 19, p167).
Accompanying the media speculation that the bottle found in Amesbury was unused was the suggestion that the bottle that had actually been used on Skripal’s door was still undiscovered somewhere. This suggestion maintains the over-arching narrative whereby a bottle of novichok was used by Russian secret agents, which they then discarded.
However, if the bottle that was found in Rowley’s flat was not in fact the bottle that had been used to contaminate Skripal’s door, there is no reason to suppose that a fake perfume bottle of any kind was used and discarded, still less any evidence to that effect. The poison could have been applied using a syringe disguised as a pen, for argument’s sake, or the tip of a specially-adapted umbrella — or any other imaginary means that might emanate from spy fiction.
An even more improbable alternative explanation for Rowley saying that the bottle was boxed and sealed might be that the Russian secret agents in Salisbury had brought with them some kind of portable, battery-powered heat sealing device, which they used to seal the bottle in plastic after using it.
Given that the Russian secret agents would have had to take apart their assassination weapon first — exposing themselves to immense danger in the process of doing so, if the bottle genuinely contained an incredibly deadly neurotoxin — this suggestion was roundly mocked at the time by independent journalists and bloggers who were following the case.
In 2020 Rob Slane, a resident of Salisbury who wrote extensively about the case at his website The Blogmire (now no longer online, but available through the Internet Archive) listed the idea that the two Russian secret agents had “brought a cellophane wrapping machine to Salisbury to wrap the used box up in, before discarding it” as one of 40 “absurd, implausible and sometimes downright impossible things that one has to believe” to accept the official account of events.
Similarly, the blogger and journalist Iain Davis referred to a portable “cellophane sealing machine” in his wonderfully sardonic 30 minute video report ‘Skripal Salisbury Chemical Weapons Attack’ from 2019. “For some inexplicable reason,” Davis says, “in an incredibly dangerous and totally unnecessary manoeuvre, the pair decided to remove the spray nozzle from the lethal bottle of novichok before somehow managing to seal it up again inside a cellophane-wrapped perfume gift box”.
But the inquiry took no account of such sceptical voices in the alternative media — and almost no questions have been asked by journalists working in the mainstream media over the years since the Salisbury events.
And so the inquiry heard that the two Russian secret agents probably did bring a portable heat sealer with them to Salisbury with which to seal up their assassination weapon in plastic before then dumping it in a bin.
Not only did the inquiry hear testimony to this effect, but it was taken at face value by the lawyers involved and Lord Hughes — with the theory developed by lead counsel O’Connor and supported by statements from counter-terrorism chief Cmdr Murphy. No questions were asked about the rationale. The inquiry even spent an afternoon interviewing a forensic expert in the kind of marks that heat sealers make on plastic wrapping.
The idea that two Russian secret agents in Salisbury had a portable heat sealer with them was first suggested on Day 16, during testimony by the anonymous expert ‘MK26’, “the lead DSTL scientific advisor to the police investigations into the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings”.
‘MK26’ was granted total anonymity by the inquiry: their testimony was not streamed on YouTube and is only available to read in transcript.
Adam Straw KC, representing the Sturgess family, asked ‘MK26’ about a written submission that had been provided to the inquiry before proceedings began, part of which was put on screen for participants to read. The submission is a partial transcript of ‘MK26’ being asked questions by counter-terrorism police, and Straw’s main concern is how long the heat sealing process might have taken.
“Question 19 there, you are asked: ‘How were the wrappings sealed?’”, Straw says (Day 16, p196). “I think [your] response is: ‘Small portable heat sealers are widely available.’ Can you explain any more of that, please?”
“This is clearly outside of my area of expertise,” ‘MK26’ replies. “However, you can go onto Google or to Amazon and find small portable heat sealers for plastic bags for kitchen use predominantly. They are the size of a small stapler, so quite small, and are able to firmly seal plastic and so it is possible that that is — that that type of device could have been used.”
“The question [then] is: how long does it take to put the plastic encased items into the box?” Straw asks. “I think [the police] are asking here about plastic wrappers around — if that was the state that they were in, how long would it take those to put into the Nina Ricci box. The answer is 10 seconds, but then it’s also added there: ‘To heat seal, an approximation of two minutes was given.’ Is that your answer first?”
“Yes, but we were guessing and I think you will hear from a packaging expert who may be better placed to comment than I am,” ‘MK26’ replies.
The suggestion that a portable heat sealer was used by the Russian secret agents was made more emphatically by Keith Asman, head of forensics and digital investigations for the police’s south-east region counter-terrorism unit, in his testimony to the inquiry on the following day, Day 17 (p152).
“The reality is I believe that they used it [the bottle of novichok disguised as perfume], I believe they dismantled it, I believe they placed it into the plastic packaging and then, using a portable heat sealer, sealed some of the component parts of the device into plastic packaging, which then went into the box,” Asman said, as the YouTube feed showed lawyers in the background grinning and hiding smiles behind their hands.
“You might be right, Mr Asman, but … it’s not really based on a forensic analysis,” Lord Hughes says.
“There’s no forensic evidence whatsoever, sir, to support that — other than it slightly corroborates Mr Rowley’s account — although there were numerous accounts from him as to where [the bottle] may have come from and when,” Asman concedes.
On Day 19 (p165), O’Connor developed the portable heat sealer hypothesis with testimony from Cmdr Murphy as they considered the two Russian secret agents’ movements around Salisbury using a map of the city that notes the position of various CCTV cameras (p7 of the PDF here).
The secret agents were seen at various points on CCTV but there was apparently a 33-minute period — between 12.17pm and 12.50pm — when their movements were unaccounted for, and O’Connor presented a detailed theory about what they might have conspired to do during this time.
“As one factual possibility,” O’Connor asks Murphy, “would it have been possible after [the two Russian secret agents] disappeared from the camera … [for them] to walk down into Queen Elizabeth Gardens, go to those public toilets … pause in there to deal with the bottle, the components of the bottle, unpack it, put it into some plastic packaging, heat seal it, put it back into the box, then walk from there … to the Brown Street carpark, get rid of the box in the Brown Street car park bin and then find their way back to the High Street and walk up and reappear on those cameras that we can see within that period of time?”
“It’s entirely possible,” Murphy replies. “I think it would be quite challenging but entirely possible they could do that in 33 minutes, yes.”
“All I can do is ask you whether it’s possible,” O’Connor says.
Why the two secret agents might have decided to take apart and then seal up their bottle before dumping it is not a question O’Connor asks Murphy; nor did O’Connor explain what he meant by a “factual possibility” in describing his theory about their potential movements.
Straw, representing the Sturgess family, returned to this exchange while questioning Murphy the following day, Day 20 (p158). Straw’s main concern was then the question of how far the two Russian secret agents could have walked in Salisbury in the 33-minute window of time that is unaccounted for by the CCTV, given that they would have had to have spent some of that time in a public toilet using their portable heat sealer to seal up their assassination weapon in plastic.
Straw is clearly asking this because he wants to establish the distance the two secret agents could potentially have travelled through Salisbury before disposing of the novichok bottle in a bin. Like O’Connor, he was not remotely curious as to why the secret agents might have taken apart their assassination weapon and used a portable heat sealer to seal it into a presentation box before doing so, although this seems an obvious question.
“One question you were asked by Mr O’Connor yesterday was, is there time in that 33-minute period for them to go to Queen Elizabeth Gardens, disassemble the bottle and applicator, heat seal, package it and then get to Brown Street, and I think your answer was: ‘Quite challenging but possible’; is that right?” Straw asks Murphy.
“Yes, I think that would be challenging but it’s entirely possible,” Murphy replies.
“When you say ‘challenging’, do you mean in the time available?” Straw asks.
“Yes, in the time available, in the 33 minutes,” Murphy replies.
“Again on that hypothesis — Mr O’Connor’s hypothesis of going somewhere, dissembling it, packaging it and so and then disposing it somewhere — does your answer gives us a radius of how far they could have got in that period?” Straw asks.
“During the investigation I did actually produce some maps that do this,” Murphy replies. “They’re not immediately available unfortunately, but those maps show… where they could get in 33 minutes.”
“Assuming that they’re first going to go somewhere, disassemble it heat seal it, package it, that would give us a smaller area, wouldn’t it?” Straw asks.
“Yes, potentially, yes, albeit it’s very difficult for me to assess how long that would have taken, but yes,” Murphy replies.
And that’s where Straw’s questioning of Murphy on the subject of portable heat sealers ended.
On the afternoon of Day 21 the inquiry heard from Adam Wilson, a forensic scientist employed by a company called Cellmark Forensic Services who has expertise in marks, including the “examination of heat seals”.
Questioned by Francesca Whitelaw KC, another counsel to the inquiry, Wilson first testified that he had only been able to examine photographs of the plastic packaging apparently found by police at Rowley’s Amesbury flat provided to him on a DVD by the police, and not the packaging itself.
“Well, there may have been good reason for that,” says Lord Hughes, referring to the fact that the packaging had apparently been contaminated by the military grade nerve agent Rowley said he spilled on his hands.
Wilson testified that there were two distinct heat seals on the plastic packaging (Day 21, p179) and that both of them were “post manufacture”, with the second seal “for the purpose of holding the contents within a particular position” (p183).
Why the contents of the package would need to be sealed in such a way as to hold them in a particular position is a question that went unasked.
The closest the inquiry came to asking or answering the question of why the Russian secret agents would have taken the incredibly dangerous and unnecessary step of taking apart their weapon and then sealing it up in a presentation box before dumping it came in the closing statements on Day 24 from Lisa Giovannetti KC, the barrister representing the police (p109).
The secret agents’ use of a heat sealing device while they were in Salisbury was “consistent with steps being taken after the attack on the Skripals to repackage the container in a way which would keep safe somebody who had to handle it”, Giovannetti said.
This statement clearly raises more questions than it answers.
Who were the Russian secret agents trying to keep safe, to Giovannetti’s mind? They certainly did not disassemble the bottle for their own safety, as they would have exposed themselves to great danger while doing so, and could have simply sealed the bottle in a plastic bag without taking it apart.
Is Giovannetti suggesting that the secret agents had concern for the citizens of Salisbury, and ran the risk of accidentally killing themselves in a public toilet to protect the public? This seems even more unlikely, and she almost immediately went on to speak about the “the utter recklessness and callous disregard for public safety shown by those who were responsible for deploying and then discarding a military grade nerve agent on the streets of an English city” — a “recklessness” and “grotesque disregard for human life” the inquiry had heard about at length.
Directly before her remarks about the heat sealer and its unknown purpose, Giovannetti claimed that the amount of “empty space” in the bottle found in Rowley’s flat was “consistent, specifically” with the amount of liquid that would have been applied to Skripal’s door, and presented this to Lord Hughes as evidence that the bottle had been used.
Giovannetti here simply ignored the testimony that the inquiry had heard about Rowley spilling a substantial amount of the liquid on his hands, suggesting she was taking a very superficial view of the evidence.
Based on Giovannetti’s willingness to overlook this inconvenient testimony, the rationale of taking apart and sealing up the bottle of novichok in order to “keep safe somebody who had to handle it” — and the question of who that might be — are not problems she was likely to address or be troubled by.
What happened to this hypothetical portable heat sealer after Russian secret agents used it? Did they discard it as well, perhaps in the same bin that the bottle was supposedly dumped in?
The inquiry did not seek to ask or answer such questions either.
Point 6. The antidote given by accident
While the two Russian secret agents were apparently spending time in Salisbury dealing with their assassination weapon after they had used it — taking it apart, boxing it up, sealing it in plastic with their portable heat sealer and then apparently walking around looking for a bin to dump it in, their target — unknowingly contaminated — also travelled into Salisbury.
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia both seemingly touched the novichok that the two secret agents had earlier squirted or sprayed onto his front door handle as they left his house at around 1.30pm but, as with Rowley, it appears it took a few hours before they experienced significant effects (slightly more than two hours in the case of the Skripals, and apparently more than six hours in the case of Rowley).
Sergei apparently received a considerably higher dose of novichok than Yulia (possibly getting as much as 0.0000025 of gram into his system, if Professor Hay’s estimate about the lethality of the poison is correct — any more would have killed him).
The inquiry heard that Sergei left the house first and sat in his car while he waited for Yulia to get ready. She supposedly received a smaller dose, as a significant amount of the military grade nerve agent had seemingly been removed from the door handle by her father before she touched it herself.
“It’s my understanding that Sergei was the first to touch the door handle and likely remove the largest amount of gross contamination,” ‘FT49’ told the inquiry on Day 9 (p129). “Therefore … he had a considerably higher exposure dose … [and when] Yulia made contact with the door handle, most of that gross contamination had been removed.”
The inquiry heard that Sergei drove them to central Salisbury, where they parked in a supermarket car park. They then briefly fed ducks on the River Avon before going to a pub called The Mill at 1.45pm.
While they were feeding ducks some local boys joined them, and the inquiry was shown CCTV images of Sergei handing one of the boys some bread. Sergei’s hands had supposedly been contaminated with novichok shortly before, and the inquiry heard that one of the boys reportedly fell ill “for a day or two” afterwards. However, “no traces of the chemical weapon” were found in his system when he was “eventually tested”.
The director of public health at Wiltshire council at the time, Tracy Daszkiewicz, said “no wildlife were impacted and no children were exposed to [novichok] or became ill as a result of either [the Salisbury or the Amesbury] incident” when asked to comment in 2019 on the suggestion that boys had been contaminated — and ducks killed — by the novichok that had supposedly been on the Skripals’ hands.
The inquiry was shown CCTV of the Skripals in The Mill pub, with Yulia paying for their drinks with cash and later taking their empty glasses back to the bar. Although the glasses would have certainly been contaminated with novichok, there was no report that staff at The Mill pub became ill.
After leaving The Mill pub at around 2.15pm, the Skripals went to Zizzi’s restaurant, leaving at around 3.35pm. The inquiry was told (Day 15, p41) that there was no CCTV of them at the restaurant. There were no reports of kitchen or waiting staff becoming ill after touching the plates and cutlery the Skripals would have contaminated while they were there.
The lack of CCTV in Zizzi’s will become more significant in Part 2, where we will look at Yulia Skripal’s testimony about what happened there.
Just two minutes after they left Zizzi’s, at 3.37pm, CCTV showed Sergei and Yulia sitting on a bench near the restaurant in the central shopping area of Salisbury called The Maltings, where they apparently remained for about 30 minutes before members of the public realised they were in distress.
It is significant that neither Sergei or Yulia were able to appeal for help to the people passing by as they succumbed together to the effects of the military grade nerve agent that they had supposedly touched a couple of hours before.
The effects of novichok apparently came on almost simultaneously in them both, despite their very different physical characteristics and the separate, uncontrolled doses that they must have received when touching the front door of Sergei’s house.
Helen Ord, a medical doctor who happened to be passing by and became one of the first responders to Sergei and Yulia at the bench, told the inquiry that this was “very unusual” during her testimony.
“It’s very unusual for two people to be unwell at exactly the same moment, which was clearly what was happening,” Dr Ord said (Day 7, p26). “Why would two people in a public place be ill at exactly the same moment?”
The inquiry heard testimony from two paramedics who were subsequently called to the scene — Ian Parsons and Lisa Wood (Day 8) — but perhaps the most significant testimony came from a paramedic who treated Sergei Skripal in the ambulance that took him to Salisbury hospital.
This testimony, from a paramedic called Karl Bulpitt, was not given to the inquiry in person but came in the form of a written statement that was entered into evidence at the end of Day 8 — along with statements from several other paramedics — without examination.
In his statement Bulpitt describes attending the scene in a double-crewed ambulance driven by Zoey Thomas, an emergency care assistant, arriving at The Maltings at 4.44pm. Yulia is at this point being attended to by three paramedics including Parsons, and Bulpitt and Thomas begin to treat Sergei, who Bulpitt describes as “vomiting heavily and sweating profusely with a lot of mucus secreting from his nose”.
Joined by Lisa Wood, Bulpitt and Thomas manage to get Sergei, who had become “hypertonic” [his body had become rigid] into the back of their ambulance, where he continued to vomit. They were there joined by another paramedic, Richard Miller, a highly experienced critical care specialist from the air ambulance support team, and Bulpitt handed over to him as the senior medic now present.
“I left Zoe, Richard and Lisa to treat [Sergei] whilst I went to prepare … drugs,” Bulpitt writes in his statement. “I took hold of two vials of naloxone [a drug used to treat people who have taken an overdose of opiates such as heroin or fentanyl] and a syringe but the male began to be sick again so I jumped to the head end [of the stretcher Sergei was on] to clear his airway. In doing so I knocked over the drugs bag which went over the ambulance.”
“Once I had cleared his airway I picked up the two vials which I thought were naloxene,” Bulpitt’s statement continues. “I drew them up and administered them … [i]t was [then] decided that we could not do any more for him at the scene so we left to go to the hospital at around 1706 hrs… Zoey drove and Richard, Lisa and I remained treating [Sergei] in the back.
“Once the male was in the full care of the A&E medical team we left the hospital … Back at the station Zoe and another colleague Robyn cleaned out the ambulance whilst I went to replenish the drugs bag. Whilst I was doing this, I realised that I was not missing any naloxone which I expected to be as I had used two vials on the male [Sergei].
“I searched the bag for what was missing and noticed that two vials containing Atropine were missing. I then realised that I must have administered Atropine instead of naloxone as a result of knocking over the drugs bag … I reported this on the Datix Service [an incident reporting system] and returned the drugs bag to the rack. We carry Atropine to treat the symptoms of systemic bradycardia — slow heart rate.”
Bulpitt’s supposed mistake under pressure was, by any measure, an extraordinarily fortunate one from Sergei Skripal’s point of view. Atropine is not only a treatment for bradycardia, but as it happens is also one of the two main treatments for nerve agent poisoning — specifically, organophosphate nerve agent poisoning, the class of neurotoxins to which VX and novichok belong that were originally derived from pesticides.
Often loosely described as a nerve agent antidote and apparently ascribed extraordinary therapeutic power in the case of Sergei Skripal, atropine is more accurately described as a symptomatic or supportive treatment for organophosphate poisoning because it does not reverse the underlying cause of the poisoning — it merely mitigates some of the effects.
This distinction between an antidote and supportive treatment is critical, especially given the claims about novichok’s extreme lethality and the suggestion that Bulpitt’s accidental administration of atropine had somehow saved Skripal’s life.
Atropine needs to be used in combination with another drug, pralidoxime or 2-PAM, to effectively counter nerve agent toxicity — and both need to be administered as rapidly as possible after exposure for the victim to stand a chance of avoiding death or permanent and severe injury.
It is worth looking at how Steven Morris of The Guardian reported on the extraordinary revelation that Sergei had received treatment for nerve agent poisoning by accident. In an article headlined ‘Paramedic gave Sergei Skripal novichok antidote by chance, inquiry hears’, Morris writes:
“A paramedic has described the extraordinary moment he knocked over a drugs bag as he treated the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and then by chance gave him a nerve agent antidote that may have saved his life.”
“Karl Bulpitt told the inquiry into the Wiltshire poisonings that he meant to administer naloxone, a drug that counters the effects of an opioid overdose, to Skripal as he was taken by ambulance to hospital.”
“But as he tried to keep Skripal breathing, he knocked over his drugs bag and then picked up vials of the nerve agent antidote atropine by mistake. It was only when Bulpitt returned to base that he realised.”
What is remarkable about Morris’s reporting here is not only that he describes atropine as an antidote, giving the reader the impression that the effects of incredibly deadly organophosphate nerve agents such as VX can be effectively reversed by a relatively common generic drug derived from the Belladonna plant, but also that he gives the reader the strong impression Bulpitt delivered his testimony to the inquiry in person, rather than in the form of a written statement that was entered into evidence at the end of a day without it being read out in part or considered by the inquiry at all.
To his credit, Morris covered the inquiry more thoroughly than most — The Guardian was the only mainstream outlet to report in any detail on the suggestion that the two Russian secret agents had a portable heat sealer with them in Salisbury, although this was also mentioned by the BBC.
However, Morris has form when it comes to misrepresenting details about the treatment that the victims of the novichok allegedly used in Salisbury received.
Back in July 2019, before Dawn’s daughter successfully challenged the original coroner’s decision concerning her mother’s death in the High Court and forced the UK government to set up the inquiry, Morris reported a remarkable detail about the treatment Charlie Rowley received — a detail that seemed to explain his survival. In an article headlined ‘Revealed: anti-nerve agent drug was used for first time in UK to save novichok victim’, Morris and his colleague Caroline Bannock wrote:
“Paramedics saved the life of one of the Wiltshire novichok victims by administering an anti-nerve agent drug at the scene that had never been used on a patient before in the UK, it can be revealed … Rowley was given an anti-nerve agent drug that British crews began to carry at the height of the al-Qaida threat but had not used until then.”
But when the inquiry was set up five years later and as hearings were about to begin, Morris’s story changed. The “anti-nerve agent drug that British crews began to carry at the height of the al-Qaida threat” — a drug that had supposedly never been used in the UK before — turned into the generic drug atropine: a drug derived from a plant that had been known for its medicinal properties since the 3rd Century BC.
Remarkably, Morris still called it an “anti-novichok” drug as if it had been recently developed for the purpose.
“The Guardian revealed in 2019 that paramedics used an anti-novichok drug, atropine, on Rowley, which may have saved his life,” Morris wrote in June 2024, suggesting atropine has extraordinary effectiveness when used to treat exposure to military grade nerve agents.
It should be mentioned that the CEO of DSTL Porton Down at the time of the Salisbury events in 2018 told Sky News that novichok is so deadly that there is no antidote available to counteract its effects, and a Soviet-era scientist who had apparently worked on the development of novichok before defecting to the US said that any treatment would not be able to prevent catastrophic injury to anyone exposed to it, such is its toxicity.
It should also be mentioned that there are protocols in place when paramedics decide to administer drugs to patients at the scene of an incident or in an ambulance, with a second person required to check the specific drug before it is administered. These were described to the inquiry by the paramedic Lisa Wood in her testimony on Day 8 (p97).
“For any drugs that we administer there is a two-step check, so you check it yourself and then you check — you get somebody — normally it’s a colleague … to check the drug before I gave it, just to make sure it’s the one I want to give,” Wood said.
Clearly, this did not happen when Bulpitt accidentally administered atropine to Sergei Skripal in the ambulance, even though he had three colleagues with him at the time. Under the circumstances Bulpitt describes, it would appear he could have given Sergei almost any drug that had spilled from his drugs bag, and like many drugs atropine is itself toxic at the wrong dose and under the wrong conditions.
Mark Faulkner, a consultant in emergency medicine who was appointed by the inquiry to review the ambulance service’s response to the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings, gave testimony on Day 11 and provided his view of the mistake Bulpitt had made (p144).
“There will be times as an ambulance clinician where there is no one available to check a drug,” Faulkner said. “That wasn’t the case in Salisbury and therefore I would be critical that a drug check wasn’t done.”
“We have heard here, of course, that the accidental administration in this particular instance was not only unlikely to have harmed Mr Skripal, but… in your report you indicate that it could well have been a life saving intervention, albeit in error?” Whitelaw asks Faulkner.
“Yes,” Faulkner confirms.
Other witnesses and lawyers gave testimony to the inquiry to the effect that Bulpitt’s extraordinary mistake could have saved Sergei’s life — or at least significantly aided his recovery.
On the afternoon of Day 9 (p120) ‘FT49’ told the inquiry that “the inadvertent administration of atropine… was an excellent drug dosing error to make and… was… clinically beneficial in maintaining Sergei’s heart rate”, as lead counsel O’Connor smiled and snorted through his nose.
On Day 24 (p140) Bridget Dolan KC, a barrister representing the South West Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT), told the inquiry that “Mr Skripal was erroneously administered atropine rather than naloxone … although this error was somewhat fortuitous in hindsight, given the reversing effect of atropine upon nerve agent poisoning, SWASFT still recognised that this was … a significant drug error”.
While Bulpitt may have inadvertently helped Sergei Skripal by mistake, Yulia Skripal was not so lucky: she did not receive atropine by accident while she was in the back of an ambulance.
Perhaps because of this, the inquiry was told that when she arrived at hospital she was in a significantly worse condition than her father.
However, she made a swift and very unexpected recovery.
>>(Next article in series) Part 2: Yulia wakes up, and the novichok that vanished from a hotel room
(Featured Image: “Gargoyle, Salisbury Cathedral (2 of 5) – geograph.org.uk – 2357475” by Brian Robert Marshall is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)
