What happens when official evidence about a nerve agent death exists in impossible dual states? Part two of a three-part report on the Dawn Sturgess case examines elements simultaneously coherent yet confused, recorded yet rejected, detected yet undetectable.
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.
Part 1 of this investigation revealed how the nerve agent novichok maintained striking contradictions: simultaneously lethal yet harmless. Part 2 examines how this dual state extends beyond the poison itself.
Point 7. The critical patient who wasn’t critical
The statements of Dr Stephen Cockroft (morning of Day 9) provided some of the most revealing testimony that the inquiry heard: that of a senior doctor removed from duty and silenced after discovering that Yulia Skripal was in far better health than she was expected to be following her alleged exposure to a nerve agent more deadly than VX.
But to understand how significant Cockroft’s testimony was, some background is needed.
Dr Cockroft is a highly experienced doctor, who had been working at Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) since 1994. He told the inquiry that he had been an intensive care consultant for 24 years at the time of the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
Together with another intensive care specialist — Dr James Haslam (who gave testimony in the afternoon of Day 8) — Cockroft was involved in caring for the Skripals during their first week in hospital following their admission in the early evening of Sunday, 4 March 2018.
It was Cockroft who was on duty when Sergei and Yulia were admitted, and his testimony to the inquiry was the first time his account of what happened was made public.
Both Cockroft and Haslam testified that they considered the possibility that the Skripals had somehow been poisoned relatively early on — they had apparently started to suspect this by Monday afternoon — although their opinions differed on what kind of poison might have been involved, and the working diagnosis that the paramedics had made of an opiate-related incident when they first encountered Sergei and Yulia incapacitated in the centre of Salisbury seems to have been maintained at the hospital for about 24 hours.
The medical staff at the hospital told the BBC that they did not initially take any additional precautions for themselves in the form of barrier nursing or enhanced personal protective equipment because there was “no indication” of nerve agent poisoning when the Skripals were admitted.
Curiously, Haslam was called to give testimony to the inquiry the day before Cockroft — and it was Haslam’s statements and testimony about the condition of the Skripals on their arrival at hospital that the inquiry heard, even though he was not there. Cockroft — who was there and witnessed their original presentation — was not asked to give testimony on this point when he appeared before the inquiry the following day.
“I wasn’t present [at the hospital’s emergency department] on that Sunday, but I would have consulted the records and also spoken to colleagues who were present [in preparing my statement],” Haslam said (Day 8, p123). In both cases, Haslam said, “the clinical picture [when the Skripals arrived at SDH] was one of profound compromise of the central and peripheral nervous systems”.
As well as giving personal testimony the day after Haslam, Cockroft provided two written statements to the inquiry, the first of which was taken two weeks after the Salisbury events by “officers from counterterrorism command”, dated 19 March 2018. His second statement — in which he apparently sought to clarify elements of his first statement specifically for the benefit of the inquiry — was dated 18 July 2024.
“I was on duty the weekend of Sunday 4th of March 2018 when the two patients, Yulia and Sergei were admitted,” Cockroft’s first statement reads. “I was one of the first doctors to meet them at the emergency department and since their admission I looked after them up until the end of the day on Monday. I later assisted my colleagues on the intensive care unit (ICU) on Wednesday and Thursday.”
Cockroft handed over to Haslam on Monday afternoon. At some point late on Sunday or in the very early early hours of Monday morning, Cockroft had been told to “Google” Sergei Skripal (Day 14, p53) “by one of the Police Constables” (Day 9, p15) and become aware of “the spy link” (Day 9, p21).
It was because of this that Cockroft apparently started to suspect that the Skripals had been subjected to a poison attack. However, his initial suspicions were that they had been poisoned by the powerful synthetic opioid carfentanyl, rather than fentanyl (also a powerful and dangerous opiate but less potent than carfentanyl and, as we know from part 1, potentially a drug of abuse), heroin, or an organophosphate nerve agent such as novichok.
“Carfentanyl has a potency hundreds of thousands of times greater than fentanyl,” Cockroft told the inquiry (Day 9, p27). “Fentanyl itself is an extremely potent opiate. We use it as an anaesthetic agent … daily and it is extremely dangerous in recreational hands. Carfentanyl is off the scale.”
Haslam by contrast had apparently already started to suspect some kind of organophosphate poisoning, although it is not clear how much time he could have had with Yulia and Sergei — or spent examining their records — to have come to that diagnosis, given that he had not been at SDH when the Skripals were admitted and was presumably relying on Cockroft to update him during their handover.
“My recollection is that when we handed over on the Monday afternoon that Dr Cockroft was under the impression that it was likely to be an exotic opioid substance, so something more likely carfentanyl, and that was his working diagnosis … an exotic opioid that might be used to assassinate someone,” Haslam told the inquiry (Day 8, p156). “That was his working diagnosis.”
“[But by the time of the] handover … I suspected possibly organophosphates,” Haslam said (Day 8, p143). “It no longer felt like an opioid poisoning or overdose. The symptoms had evolved… and it wasn’t feeling like an opioid toxicity to me by that stage.”
“From the Monday afternoon … organophosphates were my working diagnosis,” Haslam said (Day 8, p162). “[M]ost of Monday night I spent researching about organophosphates … [and learning about] nerve agents, so I was suspecting nerve agents by Monday night-time.” (Day 8, p164).
Haslam’s suspicions were seemingly confirmed by tests on blood samples that had been taken from the Skripals on the Sunday evening and sent to a specialised laboratory in Birmingham as well as DSTL Porton Down, with the results from the latter coming through first in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
“The police had requested … blood samples, which had also been processed at DSTL and so those results were phoned through [early] on the Tuesday morning … to my night team,” Haslam told the inquiry (Day 8, p163).
The results from the laboratory in Birmingham came through on Wednesday at 17.10 (see slide 3 from the inquiry document here) and provided confirmatory diagnosis. The tests “confirmed our suspicions that it was severe poisoning with an anticholinesterase substance, so something suppressing the activity of the enzyme cholinesterase”, Haslam said (Day 8, p162).
Cholinesterase inhibition is evidence of nerve agent poisoning, as organophosphate nerve agents like novichok and VX work by blocking an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase in the body. This causes the muscles to lose control, leading rapidly to death by asphyxiation or cardiac arrest.
It is worth pausing here to note that Haslam was not the first person involved in the response to the Salisbury events to suggest a cholinesterase inhibitor was the cause of Yulia and Sergei’s collapse, and there appears to have been a breakdown of communication between the police and hospital staff that prevented Cockroft — and by extension, Haslam — from being made aware of the possibility that a nerve agent was involved in the very early hours of Monday morning, as early as around 1.30am.
According to the witness statement of one of the police officers involved, Detective Inspector Ben Mant, the first person to suggest a cholinesterase inhibitor was involved was a Wiltshire police constable (PC) referred to by the inquiry as ‘VN005’.
Although subordinate to DI Mant in rank, ‘VN005’ had specialised knowledge — he was a trained firearms officer and also a “a CBRN [Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear] tactical advisor” (Day 15, p140).
In his statement, DI Mant describes a briefing meeting he held at Salisbury police station, Bourne Hill at 22.50 on the Sunday evening, involving officers including Temporary Police Sergeant (TPS) Tracey Holloway and PC Alex Way, who had both earlier attended the scene in central Salisbury where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were discovered incapacitated on a bench. PC Way had been wearing a body camera, which recorded what they saw, and ‘VN005’ had apparently been able to view the footage of Sergei Skripal.
When he began the briefing, Mant states, “We were joined almost immediately by VN005 who explained to me that he was a CBRN advisor … This is the first time, to the best of my knowledge, that I had met Tracey, Alex and VN005.
“VN005 … inform[ed] me that the Skripals’ symptoms as described by the attending officers were consistent with a cholinesterase inhibitor — otherwise known as a nerve agent.
“VN005 provided me with a document of common indicators and the symptoms observed by PC Way and TPS Holloway were consistent with seven out of 12 possible indications.
“This immediately alarmed me and at 23.10 hours, I rang Detective Superintendent [Tim] Corner [Mant’s superior officer] … to advise him of what VN005 had told me. Det Supt Corner reassured me that he had already been contacted by VN005 and that he had spoken to the on-call officers at the CBRN centre. He was waiting for further calls but they appeared far less concerned than PC VN005.”
‘VN005’ also provided statements and documents to the inquiry, and reported what happened at DI Mant’s briefing.
“At 2115 hours I arrived at Bourne Hill Police station in Salisbury,” the main statement from ‘VN005’ reads. “At 2130 hours I watched PC Way’s body worn camera footage of her attendance at the initial scene. This footage shows … a male sat on a bench displaying symptoms which I believed were consistent with either a high dose of radiation or a potential nerve agent.
“Then at 2250 hours Detective Inspector Mant … started an initial brief with all involved. I advised DI Mant of my suspicions of a chemical exposure and passed him a list of nerve agent symptoms to pass on to hospital staff.”
A copy of the document that ‘VN005’ provided to Mant, listing nerve agent symptoms with ticks next to symptoms ‘VN005’ felt were being displayed by Sergei Skripal, was shown to the inquiry. This was apparently the document that ‘VN005’ wanted Mant to pass on to the hospital.
But this is the point at which communication between the police and the hospital seemingly broke down because, although DI Mant goes on to describe driving to the hospital after the briefing at Bourne Hill and talking to Dr Cockroft on the phone when he arrived there, there is nothing to suggest Mant gave the hospital staff the document ‘VN005’ had given him listing nerve agent symptoms.
There is also nothing to suggest Mant asked Cockroft about the possibility of nerve agent poisoning during their conversation, even though Mant said how alarmed he had been by the suggestion from ‘VN005’ that a nerve agent had been the cause of the Skripals’ collapse.
Mant concluded the briefing at Bourne Hill around midnight and called his superior officer again.
“At 00.15 hours I called Det Supt Corner back to update him,” Mant’s statement reads (p7). “Det Supt Corner directed that the priority was to make contact with the ICU consultant and to share with them the information (that was readily available online) about Mr Skripal. This was to make sure that the consultant knew what we knew about the Skripals. We also agreed that I should personally visit the hospital and speak directly with the consultant.
“At 01.00 hours, [I] arrived at Salisbury District Hospital and made [my] way to the Intensive Care Unit. Mr Cockroft was not there but I was informed … he was happy to receive a phone call and would expect to be called. I took [a] phone to a nearby doctor’s office and spoke to him, in private, from there.
“I asked Mr Cockroft what he knew about the patients and he immediately explained that he had ‘googled’ Sergei and was aware of the spy link… I was relieved that he already knew this as it made life easier in terms of disclosing/sharing the information.”
Mant goes on to describe his conversation with Cockroft about the potential causes of the Skripals’ condition, but nowhere does he mention that they discussed the possibility of nerve agent poisoning, or the document describing nerve agent symptoms that ‘VN005’ had apparently given him to take to the hospital.
“We then went on to talk about what may have caused their illness,” Mant’s statement reads. “Mr Cockroft explained that … he had … [called for] a urine toxicology scan for opiates and cocaine but that it was not a quick process and he asked whether the police could do anything more quickly. I stated … that we could fast track the examination of the blood and urine … Mr Cockroft was grateful for this.
“Mr Cockroft agreed that it was unlikely to be radiation poisoning, or ricin (of which he had some previous experience), as the symptoms for them have a slow onset. This was consistent with the advice given to Det Supt Corner by the CBRN experts. We discussed whether this could be a suicide attempt or a homicide/suicide attempt and he stated that he felt it most likely that some form of poison had been ingested.
“Mr Cockroft thought the cause may have been ingested due to the speed of onset of symptoms. He stated that both of the Skripals were currently sedated in order that they could receive supportive therapy but that he would attempt to wake them later in the morning … I finished the conversation with Mr Cockroft at about 01.24 hours.”
Mant’s report that Cockroft was considering an attempt to “wake” the Skripals “in the morning” is something we will return to.
Both Mant and ‘VN005’ gave testimony to the inquiry in person.
The testimony from ‘VN005’ was given in complete anonymity, with no YouTube stream made public and only the transcript made available. The testimony includes reference to his list of nerve agent symptoms as a “ready reckoner” (Day 15, p120). “I passed this [list] to Inspector Mant to pass on to the hospital,” the transcript reads (Day 15, p166).
“You suggested that DI Mant inform the hospital to check for bloods of any cholinesterase inhibiting compounds?” Andrew O’Connor KC, the lead counsel for the inquiry, asks ‘VN005’ (Day 15, p168).
“Correct,” ‘VN005’ replies.
Mant’s testimony includes reference to the list of nerve agent symptoms given to him by ‘VN005’ as an “aide memoire” (Day 14, p14) and his consequent anxiety about the possibility of a nerve agent-related event having occurred in Salisbury (Day 14, p16).
Mant’s testimony also reports his phone conversation with Cockroft and their discussion about expediting the testing of urine and blood samples that had been taken from the Skripals — but if they discussed the possibility of nerve agent poisoning Mant did not testify to that effect, and as in his written statement Mant did not report handing the document ‘VN005’ had given him to anyone at the hospital while he was there (Day 14, p54).
The inquiry’s lawyers did not pick up on this apparent breakdown of communication between the police and the hospital on the critical issue of when nerve agent poisoning could have been diagnosed in the case of the Skripals — or at least presented to the medical staff as a serious possibility.
As we know, the diagnosis apparently made intuitively by Haslam on Monday afternoon around the time of his handover with Cockroft — and then indicated by the results from DSTL Porton Down in the early hours of Tuesday morning — had been confirmed by results from the laboratory in Birmingham on Wednesday evening.
After his handover with Haslam, Cockroft had a day off — but on Wednesday he was back at work at SDH. The ICU staff there were now aware that the Skripals had apparently been poisoned by a nerve agent, and a major incident — related to the earlier working diagnosis of fentanyl poisoning — had already been declared the day before.
Cockroft’s 2018 statement indicates his duties on his return to the ICU were to care for the other patients there while Haslam concentrated on Sergei and Yulia Skripal — as well as Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who was admitted on Tuesday after suffering symptoms following his search of Sergei’s home in the early hours of Monday morning.
Bailey had already been to the hospital for a check-up later on Monday and was given the all-clear, but his symptoms persisted and he returned on Tuesday for what turned into a 17-day stay in hospital.
Bailey was not as severely affected by the nerve agent that was supposedly used to contaminate the front door of Sergei’s home as the Skripals had been. He had been wearing a forensic suit — designed to maintain the integrity of evidence at a crime scene and offer a degree of protection against contamination, but not designed to protect the wearer against extremely hazardous substances such as a chemical weapon — when he went to the house (Day 13, p53).
Bailey did not need to be put on ventilation and remained conscious throughout his stay at SDH. He suffered no lasting physical injury from his apparent exposure to novichok and a year and a half later, in August 2019, he ran a marathon in support of the hospital, raising almost £20,000.
Yulia and Sergei by contrast had been “intubated and mechanically ventilated” when they were admitted to hospital, as Haslam told the inquiry (Day 8, p123, p125).
Yulia was particularly in need of ventilation as without it she would apparently not have been able to breathe and would have died. Sergei was also intubated because, although he was able to breathe without assistance when he arrived at hospital, he was in a deep coma (Day 8, p123).
Intubation typically requires the patient to be sedated due to the discomfort of a tube being put into their airway and maintained there, and this sedation may involve fentanyl — unless the patient is believed to have potentially overdosed on some kind of opiate, in which case opiate-based pain relief would not be used as this could obviously exacerbate their condition.
Fentanyl is, therefore, unlikely to have been given to Sergei and Yulia Skripal — or Dawn Sturgess — when they were admitted to SDH and intubated: something the pathologist Professor Guy Rutty did not consider when he gave testimony to the inquiry about the various drugs found in Dawn’s urine sample, which we looked at in part 1.
Leaving that to one side, it is routine practice in ICUs to carry out what is called a “sedation hold” (or sedation interruption) with sedated patients, particularly those on mechanical ventilation. This means the administration of the drugs that are keeping the patient unconscious — generally done through an automatic pump or drips — are paused in order for the patient to emerge from their medically-induced sleep.
This practice is what Cockroft was referring to when he told DI Mant that he “would attempt to wake [the Skripals] later in the morning” when they had their phone conversation in the early hours of Monday.
It is not clear if Cockroft did in fact order a sedation hold for either Yulia or Sergei before he handed over responsibility for their care to Haslam on Monday afternoon, although the statements of both Cockroft and Haslam strongly suggest this would have been standard practice.
The evidence that sedation holds are helpful for a patient’s recovery is strong and a survey conducted 10 years before the Salisbury events suggested that 78% of ICUs in the UK carried out sedation holds on a daily basis or even more frequently.
“Sedation holds are things that we do two or three times a day,” Cockroft says in his statement from 2018 (p7). “When we have a longer term intensive care patient, by this I mean patients that are going to be with us for more than two days, it is routine practice to stop drugs that are sedating to patient to allow them to wake up and interact with the nursing staff or the Doctors.
“We want to know if they are pain free, we want to know if they are anxious, we want to know if they are breathless and it’s an opportunity to reassure the patient that they are fine.
“The other reason we do this is we want to make sure that we are not giving them too much sedation, as we want them to maintain muscular activity, it speeds up their convalescence, otherwise if you flatten them completely their muscles can take weeks longer to get them off of the ventilator and walking about.”
Whether or not a sedation hold had been ordered for Yulia or Sergei before, Haslam apparently ordered a sedation hold for Yulia on Thursday.
“I would like to ask you about … [Yulia’s] sedation hold,” Émilie Pottle KC, one of the barristers for the inquiry, asked Haslam (Day 8, p176). “Your colleague Dr Cockroft … explains [in his written statements] that you had ordered a sedation hold for Yulia on Thursday 8 March, which is a routine practice, he says; is that correct?”
“That’s correct,” Haslam replies.
“I think you told us earlier this afternoon that it is done in order for you to assess — it’s a normal practice for you to stop the sedation to see the neurological function; is that right?” Pottle asks.
“That’s a standard, almost daily part of intensive care practice, yes,” Haslam replies.
“Dr Cockroft says that you had ordered the sedation hold, but that you weren’t present when Yulia Skripal regained consciousness; is that right?” Pottle asks.
“I wasn’t present in the room, but I was present on the intensive care unit… just round the corner in an office,” Haslam says.
Whether Haslam was present on the ICU or not, it seems Cockroft was the consultant called to respond to Yulia as she woke up by staff on the intensive care ward because they could not locate Haslam, or because he was temporarily unavailable, possibly in a meeting.
With the hospital having been informed by DSTL Porton Down that blood tests showed Yulia and Sergei had apparently been exposed to a nerve agent, Cockroft believed Yulia would have suffered severe neurological injury and permanent brain damage as a result.
But to his astonishment, he found this was not the case.
“An untoward event took place on Thursday 8 March 2018,” Cockroft writes in his statement from 2024 (p1, paragraph 2). “A colleague (Dr James Haslam) had ordered all sedation to be discontinued temporarily to Yulia Skripal … unfortunately, Dr Haslam [then] left the ICU without advising me.
“I was present on the ICU treating another patient … [and] Yulia Skripal regained consciousness very quickly. [She] was confused, frightened, trying to get out of bed and was pulling at her various vascular access lines and breathing tube. She was in severe danger of injuring herself.
“On entering her hospital room, I immediately took hold of her hands and tried to reassure her that she was safe. Simultaneously I asked the two nurses present to restart her sedation, but as these were infusion pumps it was going to take several minutes for sedation to become effective.
“Whilst these infusions were recommenced, I tried to reassure Yulia that she was safe, as was her father. I had absolutely no idea what they had both experienced on that fateful Sunday 4 March 2018 and had no idea if they had been attacked or would have had any knowledge or insight into the events that had led to their hospital admission.
“During those few minutes I asked Yulia if she had any recollection of her and her father being assaulted in some way. Fortunately, after some five minutes, she was safely sedated and support of her breathing could be re-established.”
In his 2018 statement, Cockroft says he was with another doctor — referred to only by her first name, Anna — while he attended to Yulia.
“Anna… is also a doctor, she is a visiting medical registrar, she is a very senior chest doctor [but] she ha[d] very little medical intensive care experience and [was] working in the ICU for training purposes,” Cockroft states (p1, paragraph 2).
It seems it was Anna who alerted Cockroft to Yulia’s rapid recovery of consciousness, and Anna also spoke to Yulia as nurses worked to re-establish her sedation. Cockroft describes his perception of Yulia’s neurological health as she did so.
“Anna explained [to Yulia] that she had just brought the intensive care unit consultant in,” Cockroft says (p3). “I was staggered to see Yulia with her eyes open and apparently responding in a meaningful way. Yulia was looking at Anna in a purposeful way, her eyes were wide open, her gaze was directed towards Anna in a way that suggested to me that she had good vision to perceive that Anna was the person that was talking to her.
“It wasn’t a response we would see from someone with brain damage for example, their gaze would not be as precise as it were, they may hear a noise but they don’t necessarily look towards it, however Yulia was looking directly at Anna and it was an encouraging sign.”
Cockroft gave more detail about what happened when he spoke to the inquiry in person.
“I will be honest with you, I was … gobsmacked,” Cockroft told Pottle (Day 9, p32).
“This was a girl I never thought I would see move again. I never thought she would be capable of having a conversation. I was quite convinced she suffered catastrophic brain damage and I couldn’t believe that she could be as neurologically intact as she obviously was.
“She was looking at me, she was nodding, she was crying, she was absolutely terrified and I was explaining to her where she was … [trying to] offer some reassurance and all I desperately really wanted was the sedation to go back on and the whole thing to stop.”
Watching the inquiry’s YouTube stream Cockroft is very emotional as he recalls what happened. It seems he believes he was doing everything he could as a professional, and was acting entirely out of concern for Yulia.
Pottle picks up on a key part of Cockroft’s written statement (p4) about what he said to Yulia, where he writes: “I wanted to make a point of telling her that we knew she had been poisoned, that we knew what it was and that she was getting the right treatment to get her better.”
“At one stage you asked her about who had poisoned her?” Pottle asks.
“I asked if anybody had attacked them,” Cockroft replies. “[I said], ‘You have both been taken ill. Your father is in the next door room. We think you have both been poisoned. Did anybody attack you?’”
“Were you any more specific than, ‘Did anyone attack you?’” Lord Hughes, the chair of the inquiry, interjects.
“I think [I said] did anyone spray something over you?”, Cockroft replies.
“You asked if she had been sprayed?” Lord Hughes says.
“Yes,” Cockroft replies.
“Your words, not hers?” Lord Hughes asks.
“She couldn’t speak [because she was intubated],” Cockroft replies.
Yulia’s emergence from sedation and Cockroft’s testimony about his brief interaction with her is significant in a number of ways.
From the point of view of Cockroft’s career at SDH, it seems to have been something of a personal disaster. Although Haslam was apparently unconcerned by what had happened when it was reported to him, the hospital’s medical director, Christine Blanshard, took the view that Cockroft should not have spoken to Yulia about what might have happened to her, as this should have been left to the investigating authorities.
Cockroft was punished.
“I was suspended from working on the ICU with immediate effect until Yulia and Sergei had either been discharged or died,” Cockroft writes in his statement from 2024 (p2, paragraph 5). “Apparently by having had a conversation with Yulia Skripal I had been unprofessional and should have left such a conversation to the security services.”
Blanshard not only removed Cockroft from the ICU rota, but she told him that if he discussed any aspect of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia with his colleagues at the hospital it would be treated as serious professional misconduct on his part.
“I was forbidden to discuss any aspect of the presentation, recognition or initial treatment of Yulia or Sergei Skripal,” Cockroft told the inquiry (Day 9, p37).
Cockroft was also prevented by Blanshard from speaking on the subject at two meetings where the poisonings were addressed: a meeting of the Health Protection Agency at Porton Down in April 2018, and a large meeting of SDH staff on 21 June 2018.
“I have to say I thought Dr Blanshard’s attitude was a little difficult,” Cockroft said (Day 9, p36). “You know, I was the consultant with 24 years’ intensive care experience. She trained in gastroenterology and I don’t think had ever worked on an intensive care unit.”
Blanshard allowed Cockroft back onto the ICU rota after both Yulia and Sergei had been discharged from SDH. Yulia was discharged from hospital on 9 April 2018, and Sergei was discharged on 18 May; Cockroft returned to work on the ICU the day after Sergei left the hospital (Day 9, p50).
Six months after this Cockroft resigned from his position to take a job in the private sector (Day 9, p38). Perhaps his decision was unrelated to his experiences as one of the first doctors to treat Yulia and Sergei Skripal when they arrived at SDH, and his treatment by Blanshard after he spoke to Yulia when she woke up from sedation.
But the significance of Cockroft’s conversation with Yulia is more extensive than the personal impact it may have had on him and his career at SDH.
Perhaps most significantly it is relevant to a decision that was taken by the UK Court of Protection on the Skripals’ behalf a full two weeks after they were admitted to hospital, due to their apparent total incapacitation.
Before Cockroft’s testimony to the inquiry, the account of the Skripals’ health (and that of DS Nick Bailey) was that they were, at least initially, in a critical condition and on the verge of death. The suggestion in the media at the time was that exposure to novichok, widely described as a horrifyingly deadly nerve agent, would have caused them catastrophic and probably permanent injury — just as Cockroft believed it had before Yulia woke up.
An experienced ICU consultant like Cockroft, on discovering during a sedation hold that one of his patients was far more “neurologically intact” than expected following their alleged exposure to a nerve agent, might then have been expected to order further sedation holds over the following days to investigate their patient’s condition further and begin to reduce their sedation.
But with Cockroft removed from the ICU rota by the hospital’s medical director Dr Blanshard and banned from speaking to his colleagues about any aspect of the alleged poisoning of the Skripals, the suggestion that their unconscious state was medically essential — or was a direct consequence of their alleged exposure to and injury by a nerve agent — was maintained.
This suggestion was reinforced when a team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) visited Salisbury at the invitation of the UK government to carry out an investigation into the alleged novichok attacks.
The OPCW, based at The Hague in The Netherlands, is a supposedly independent watchdog with the remit to investigate chemical weapons incidents worldwide, and an OPCW team was “deployed to the United Kingdom on 19 March [2018] for a pre-deployment and from 21 March to 23 March for a full deployment” in order to confirm — among other things — DSTL Porton Down’s discovery of traces of novichok in the Skripals’ blood.
This required fresh blood samples to be taken — but the Skripals were deemed to be incapable of giving consent for this due to their unconscious or comatose state, so a judgement from the Court of Protection was sought by the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust and duly granted on 22 March, the penultimate day of the OPCW team’s visit to the UK.
“Both Mr and Ms Skripal remain in hospital under heavy sedation,” Justice Williams said in his written judgement. “The precise effect of their exposure on their long term health remains unclear albeit medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree … neither patient is expected to regain capacity by the time the sampling will be needed.”
Justice Williams noted that the medical opinion of “ZZ”, the Skripals’ unnamed “treating consultant” at SDH, was (p12):
a) Mr Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent.
b) Ms Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent.
c) Mr Skripal is unable to communicate in any way.
d) Ms Skripal is unable to communicate in any meaningful way.
e) It is not possible to say when or to what extent Mr or Ms Skripal may regain capacity.
Having blood samples taken was not the only invasive procedure the Skripals underwent at the time that they should have been asked consent for, if they had been able to give it.
Dr Haslam said in his written statement (p3) that “both patients underwent surgical tracheostomy formation on 21 March 2018” — meaning that when the OPCW team visited the Skripals in SDH to take their blood, they would have found them being ventilated not via their mouths but via surgical holes in their throats that had been made a day or two before.
There is no way the Skripals would have been able to communicate verbally under these circumstances, even if their sedation had been reduced to the point that they were able to recover consciousness.
Yulia’s tracheostomy tube was removed four days after the OPCW team returned to The Hague, having been in for a week. Sergei’s tube was removed two weeks after his daughter’s.
The BBC reporter and writer Mark Urban mentions the judgement of the Court of Protection in his book The Skripal Files, the first edition of which was published in October 2018. Urban was apparently working on a book about Sergei Skripal before the Salisbury events occurred, and his account has been generally accepted as the official version of events.
“Doctors had experimented with reducing [Yulia’s] ventilation as soon as 10 days after the attack,” Urban writes. “In court papers submitted on 20 March … Yulia is described as ‘unable to communicate in any meaningful way’.
“Within a few days of these proceedings (connected with the taking of samples by international observers) she was sufficiently improved, and sedation dialled back, that she was becoming ‘meaningful’.”
As we now know from Cockroft’s testimony, Yulia’s sedation had been “dialled back” once — at least briefly — a couple of weeks before, and according to both Haslam and Cockroft good clinical practice in the ICU is that this “dialling back” should have been a regular occurrence following the discovery that she was “neurologically intact”.
And as we shall see in a moment, Yulia was fully capable of communicating in a “meaningful way” when she was allowed to emerge from her sedation.
There are a couple of other points where Yulia’s early, unexpected return to consciousness was apparently airbrushed from the account that was given to the public at the time, maintaining the impression that the Skripals were critically injured and that their recovery — if it happened at all — was going to be more gradual than it actually was, at least in Yulia’s case.
Before The Skripal Files was published, Mark Urban made a 20 minute documentary programme for BBC Newsnight about the Salisbury events that was broadcast in May 2018, and which remains available for viewing on the BBC Newsnight YouTube channel.
About halfway through the programme, Urban says in voiceover: “After a couple of weeks [of the Skripals being hospitalised] there were gradual but distinct signs of progress. The exact timing of that, and details of the drugs given, remain matters of medical confidentiality.”
Urban was clearly being economical with the truth here, as he had been able to interview several of the medics at SDH for the programme — including the hospital’s medical director Dr Blanshard, who had removed Cockroft from the ICU and threatened him with a charge of medical misconduct if he told any of colleagues what he had discovered early on about Yulia’s good neurological condition.
It is worth reviewing a segment towards the end of the programme, when Urban asks Dr Blanshard how it is possible that the Skripals could have survived significant exposure to a nerve agent as deadly as novichok is supposed to be. Her body language is quite revealing.
“For those people who say, ‘Oh, if this was a nerve agent they’d be dead,’ what would your response to that be?” Urban asks Dr Blanshard.
“Well, they’re not,” Dr Blanshard replies, smiling nervously and avoiding eye contact by looking at her hands as she stumbles over her words. “The proof of the pudding is in the outcome [sic]… these wouldn’t be the first patients that have recovered from, for example, organophosphorus poisoning or other nerve agents.”
It is for the viewer to decide how convincing Dr Blanshard’s demeanour is.
She may have simply forgotten because of the drugs that she was being given to keep her sedated, but Yulia herself left out her brief return to consciousness from the one public statement she made about what happened to her. She gave this statement to camera for the world’s media on 23 May 2018, 44 days after she was discharged from SDH and just four days after her father left hospital.
Although Yulia had apparently previously said in a written statement that she hoped to give a full interview to the media when she was strong enough, when she did appear in public she simply read out a pre-prepared script and took no questions.
She has never been seen in public since.
“After 20 days in a coma I awoke to the news that we [she and Sergei] had been poisoned,” Yulia said, looking fully recovered apart from the scar on her neck caused by the tracheostomy she had undergone a day or two before the OPCW team had arrived in Salisbury to take her blood.
But in fact she had briefly woken up much earlier than that — after only four days in hospital — and had been able to respond in a “meaningful way” to the news that she had allegedly been poisoned then.
Bonus point: the testimony that wasn’t testimony
Between his two written statements and his personal testimony to the inquiry, the account that Cockroft gave of what happened when Yulia woke up following her sedation hold is unclear in certain areas — and because the lawyers involved in the inquiry did not ask him follow-up questions to pick up these ambiguities, a certain amount of guesswork is required around some of the statements he made.
For example, in some of the written testimony from 2024 that we have already looked at, Cockroft says: “I had absolutely no idea what [the Skripals] had both experienced on that fateful Sunday 4 March 2018 and had no idea if they had been attacked … [but] I asked Yulia if she had any recollection of her and her father being assaulted in some way.”
It appears from this that Cockroft had surmised Sergei and Yulia had been attacked, presumably because the staff at the ICU had been told by DSTL Porton Down that the Skripals had been exposed to a nerve agent. Cockroft may not have been told explicitly or officially that they were “attacked” or “assaulted” — which is perhaps why he said he had “absolutely no idea what they had both experienced” — but he seems to have made that assumption, which may be reasonable.
But Cockroft went further than that. He apparently guessed or suggested that Yulia and Sergei were attacked or assaulted with a spray, possibly because, as Dr Ord — the medical doctor who was passing by when the Skripals were discovered, and became one of the first responders — told the inquiry, “It’s very unusual for two people to be unwell at exactly the same moment, which was clearly what was happening”.
Cockroft may have imagined the Skripals were sprayed with poison at the same time and while they were together as a possible explanation for the near-simultaneous onset of effects in them both — a striking detail given their significant differences in terms of age, health and body weight.
As we have seen, the question that Cockroft asked Yulia about whether she had been sprayed with something was a detail that Lord Hughes picked up on — although his point seems to have been that this was not a claim she had made in her own words (an obvious point because she could not speak as she was intubated at the time).
In his 2018 statement Cockroft says he did not get a response to his questions asking Yulia if she was attacked or if something was sprayed over her, but he says: “I can recall Anna repeating some of the questions that I said, I can recall her asking did anyone attack you?” (p5).
Anna, the doctor who was with Cockroft while he was talking to Yulia, becomes important at this point because she apparently took notes of what Cockroft said and what Yulia’s responses were.
Cockroft’s statement continues: “After we put Yulia back to sleep, I really thought that was the end of the matter … I didn’t realise Anna had recorded the conversation I had with Yulia in her notes … [I] was just trying to reassure her. It was a conversation of … dubious significance because… she had just woken up from a coma. I wouldn’t have even wrote [sic] it in the notes … it was more to alert my colleagues that Yulia was not brain damaged.”
The fact that Anna took notes of the “conversation” Cockroft had with Yulia on Thursday 8 March is significant because it is referred to by Keith Asman, the head of forensics and digital investigations for the police’s southeast region counter-terrorism unit, in a statement he made for the inquiry that was signed on 23 October 2024.
In it Asman reports what he was told by a member of the police force code-named ‘DI VN104’ (p19, point 77).
“At some point after 2100 [on 8 March 2018] I spoke to DI VN104 who told me that Yulia Skripal had woken in hospital and had been spoken to by a medical professional, who had asked a series of questions,” Asman states.
“She was asked to blink a number of times dependant [sic] on whether the answer to the question was yes or no. Yulia Skripal was asked:
- Do you remember what happened — blinked yes
- Did you take anything at home — blinked no
- Do you remember being poisoned — blinked yes
- Do you remember being sprayed — blinked yes
- Were you sprayed at home — blinked no
- Were you sprayed at the restaurant — blinked yes
- Do you know the person that sprayed you
“At this point Yulia Skripal was described as being emotional and fell unconscious. I made notes of my conversation with DI VN104 in one of my notebooks,” Asman states.
There seems little doubt that what ‘DI VN104’ is referring to and Asman is reporting in his statement to the inquiry is the interaction between Cockroft and Yulia, as recorded by Anna in her notes. But here Cockroft seems to know some significant details about Yulia and Sergei’s movements on the Sunday that they were allegedly attacked — particularly that they went from Sergei’s home to a restaurant.
It is also not clear how Cockroft established blinking “yes” and “no” as a means of communicating with Yulia. He almost certainly had experience of communicating with intubated patients in this way in the past — but it is a significant detail that he omitted from his statements and his personal testimony to the inquiry, where he emphasised that he was simply trying to calm Yulia down and reassure her.
During his appearance before the inquiry on Day 17 — eight sitting days after Cockroft gave testimony — Asman is asked by the barrister Francesca Whitelaw KC about the “blink interview” he describes in his statement.
In the exchange that follows Asman, Whitelaw and Lord Hughes agree that Yulia’s statement that she was sprayed in the restaurant is not credible, and should not be taken seriously.
They decide that her statement can be dismissed because the forensic evidence of novichok traces supposedly found at Zizzi’s was apparently too low for the restaurant to have been the primary location of the poison; because they felt Yulia was probably confused as she had just emerged from sedation; and because the idea of being sprayed was suggested to her by Cockroft and wasn’t expressed in her own words (even though she couldn’t speak as she was intubated).
When Yulia is reported to start crying, Asman suggests that this is because she was somehow involved in the plot to poison her father, and thought she had been identified as the culprit.
“We have heard evidence about how [Yulia] woke for a brief period in hospital and was spoken to by a doctor and here we see the information that was conveyed back to you from DI VN104,” Whitelaw says to Asman (Day 17, p72).
“We see there… the suggestion, which we now know not to be right, of course: ‘Do you remember being sprayed — blinked yes’; ‘Were you sprayed at the restaurant — blinked yes.’ My question for you is: how, if at all, this impacted on your investigations?”
“It only very slightly impacted on it,” Asman replies. “I wasn’t sure whether Yulia had wittingly or unwittingly been involved [in poisoning her father, an early hypothesis of Asman’s that he describes in his statement (p15, paragraph 59)] and … I did wonder to myself if she was crying because she felt maybe she had been identified … [but] apart from that, nothing else at all.”
“You were … following the forensics,” Whitelaw says.
“Absolutely, Asman replies. “It was information to have but not necessarily going to change my approach on anything.”
“This information … was it consistent or inconsistent with what you had found out in terms of forensic about the presence of Novichok at The Mill and 47 Christie Miller Road?” Whitelaw asks.
“I would say, was inconsistent on the basis that she said she was sprayed in the restaurant —” Asman replies.
“Well, you see she didn’t,” Lord Hughes interjects. “If the record that you were given there is right, someone [Cockroft] suggested to her, ‘Had you been sprayed?’ She didn’t come up with it herself.”
“That is absolutely correct,” Asman replies. “Maybe I should rephrase to say the inference being she may have been sprayed in the restaurant, but that was not what we were seeing through the forensic results where there was only a low-level trace in that location, sir.”
“We, of course, bear in mind the circumstances that Yulia had been unconscious in hospital,” Whitelaw adds.
“Absolutely, sir, yes,” Asman replies.
“This is the so-called sedation hold, isn’t it,” Lord Hughes says. […] “But anyway the suggestion that she had been sprayed in the restaurant didn’t fit with your investigations?
“No, sir,” Asman replies.
And that’s where the inquiry’s interest in Yulia’s responses to Cockroft’s questions ends. The idea that she and her father could have been sprayed with a substance in Zizzi’s restaurant — potentially minutes before they sat on the bench where they were found — was dismissed, apparently without further investigation.
The “blink interview” was all simply the result of drug-induced confusion on Yulia’s part as far as the inquiry was concerned.
In her closing statements on Day 24, Lisa Giovannetti — the barrister for the police who, as we have seen, took a very superficial approach to the evidence when it came to the amount of liquid in the bottle found in Amesbury — made this argument explicitly.
“We say that you can place no real weight on the blink interview conducted with Yulia Skripal by Dr Cockroft, in which she is reported to indicate that she thought she had been sprayed in Zizzi’s,” Giovannetti told Lord Hughes. “If you’re satisfied on that, I won’t develop that point any further, but we say it’s inconsistent with the accounts she gave subsequently when she wasn’t under the influence of medication.”
“I say no more about it at the moment, Ms Giovannetti, but you need not push at that door,” Lord Hughes replies.
The inquiry’s dismissal of Yulia’s blink testimony is particularly striking given its ready acceptance of Charlie Rowley’s contradictory accounts, despite his admitted alcoholism and drug use affecting his memory.
While Yulia’s responses during her brief emergence from sedation were deemed too unreliable to consider seriously — even though the police had initially hypothesised that the Skripals had been poisoned in the restaurant “given the timings” (Day 15, p46) — Rowley’s frequently changing story about finding the bottle that allegedly killed Dawn was treated by inquiry as fundamentally credible.
To recap briefly on this critical testimony, upon which this narrative largely depends: Rowley variously claimed he couldn’t remember finding the bottle at all, that he found it in Salisbury, and that he picked it up off the street on his way to a chemist in Amesbury when he went there to collect his Methadone prescription (Day 22, p51). He also said at one point that he did not recognise the packaging of the bottle when it was shown to him (statement of Detective Chief Inspector Philip Murphy, paragraph 111).
Rowley later “became confident that he had found it shortly before he gave it to Dawn” in a bin (Day 1, p69), but this was dismissed by Cmdr Murphy of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command during his testimony to the inquiry because “the bins were emptied on a regular basis in that area”, (Day 22, p164) and therefore the bottle could not have remained where the two Russian secret agents allegedly dumped it for almost four months before Rowley supposedly found it.
The inquiry ultimately appeared to accept Cmdr Murphy’s “assessment … that Charlie Rowley was likely bin dipping on that day [4 March 2018, the day of the alleged novichok attack] and has recovered it on that day” (Day 22, p142) — an assessment seemingly based largely on the fact that there was CCTV footage of Rowley in the general vicinity of the Brown Street car park bins holding a black bin liner that afternoon. (Day 22, p135).
The Brown Street car park bins, we will recall, are the bins where O’Connor, the lead counsel to the inquiry, speculated as a “factual possibility” that the two Russian secret agents might have dumped their assassination weapon after going into the public toilets at Queen Elizabeth Gardens in order to take it apart and use their portable heat sealer to wrap it up in thick plastic — for a reason O’Connor didn’t speculate about.
If Rowley did find the bottle “minutes after” it was dumped, as Stephen Morris reported for The Guardian, this would mean he must have then held on to the bottle without attempting to sell it or giving it to Dawn for almost four months — something even Adam Straw, one of the barristers representing the Sturgess family, found hard to believe (Day 24, p29).
“It seems to the family most unlikely that having intentionally picked up the box Charlie would then not either have given it to Dawn or tried to sell it for nearly four months,” Straw said. “He must have been aware of it during that period, not least because he moved property on 18 May 2018. Dawn’s birthday was 18 June which was an obvious moment to give it to her as a present.”
Despite these contradictions, the inquiry accepted Rowley’s testimony as the foundation of the case that connected Dawn’s death to the Skripal incident, despite his poor memory of the events, conflicting accounts, and well-documented and admitted drug abuse issues.
Yulia’s responses by contrast were dismissed as drug-induced confusion.
If all this seems like weak or circumstantial evidence, there’s more to come.
Point 8. The hotel room novichok that disappeared
The two Russian secret agents who allegedly contaminated Sergei Skripal’s front door handle with novichok on Sunday 4 March 2018 apparently travelled from Moscow to London to Salisbury to do so.
They stayed on the Friday and Saturday nights at a budget hotel in the Tower Hamlets area of London called the City Stay, and made the journey from London to Salisbury and back twice — on both the Saturday and the Sunday — flying out of the UK from London Heathrow back to Moscow on Sunday evening.
Although one might perhaps expect secret agents on an assassination mission — allegedly ordered by the president of Russia personally — to practise a little more operational security than using well-known travel booking websites to arrange their accommodation, it seems they booked the hotel through booking.com. Not only this, but it appears the City Stay hotel was a favourite of theirs, as they had stayed there at least once before on a previous visit to the UK in 2016, using the same — apparently false — names that they used in March 2018.
Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry (Day 20, p134) that the secret agents had previously stayed at the City Stay for five nights in December 2016, having travelled to London from Paris using the Eurostar train — and that this kind of movement, travelling indirectly from Russia via an intermediate country, was not unusual for them.
“This is a common pattern for [the two secret agents] when they fly into one place,” Murphy said. “So [in 2016] they … travelled from Paris to London in order to get to the UK … and stay at City Stay.”
The journeys that the secret agents had made around Europe in the past were revealed by their visa applications, which the police were able to obtain. Their phone numbers were also obtained by the police from these visa applications, as well as from a reservation that one of them had made through booking.com in late 2017 for a hotel in Geneva (see p11 of the police document here).
Their movements around London and Salisbury were supposedly traced by data from their mobile phones, which the secret agents apparently did not change for their mission to the UK in March 2018.
For their alleged assassination mission to Salisbury, the secret agents flew into London directly from Moscow and flew directly back again, without travelling via an intermediate destination. Their mobile phone data suggested that they made their journeys to and from the City Stay hotel by public transport — railway and the London Underground.
After the secret agents had returned to Russia, the police in the UK made a major breakthrough in their investigation into the Salisbury events when they discovered traces of novichok in the room of the City Stay hotel where the secret agents had stayed.
Murphy emphasised the significance of this discovery to the inquiry on Day 19 (p187) — a discovery that was communicated to him by ‘MK26’, the lead DSTL scientific advisor to the police investigations into the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings.
“MK26 had supported the process of examining the room throughout,” Murphy said. “They informed me that of the 30 swabs taken, two… had returned a positive for Novichok. One was on the window latch and one was on the sink in the hotel room and that was clearly a very significant development… because it demonstrated that [the Russian secret agents] had been in a hotel room where we were now finding Novichok.”
“At this point … we didn’t yet have a recovered device that contained Novichok or anything else, so I was unable to link [the Russian secret agents] specifically to an amount of Novichok or a device of any kind,” Murphy continued. “This took us substantially further in demonstrating that a hotel room well away from Salisbury, in London [was] directly connected to our individuals … [because there was] a room in which they stayed [where] we were now finding contamination of Novichok.”
Murphy told the inquiry that the discovery was also significant for the police because it informed the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to charge the two Russian secret agents with the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, as well as the policeman Nick Bailey.
“[The discovery] was a factor … in our engagement with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS),” Murphy said (Day 19, p193). “So when considering charges we were very open and transparent about MK26’s results to ensure that the CPS were making an appropriately informed decision about charging decisions, where clearly Novichok in a hotel room where our two suspects had stayed was a very significant development.”
Giovannetti, the barrister representing the police, also highlighted the presence of novichok in the hotel room where the two Russian secret agents had stayed as a significant factor during her closing remarks.
“The presence of Novichok at the City Stay Hotel demonstrates that [the Russian secret agents] had the means to commit the attack,” she told Lord Hughes (Day 24, p95). “MK26 was a careful and obviously expert witness whose evidence we submit you can accept in full … [the secret agents] must have had the Novichok used in the attack on the Skripals with them in … the City Stay Hotel prior to the point that it was deployed.
“In short, before the attack they had possession of what was intended to be the murder weapon.”
There were, however, some remarkable details about this evidence that was apparently so critical to the case against the two Russian secret agents.
The first fact to be understood is that the traces of novichok that the Russian secret agents supposedly left in the City Stay hotel were not discovered until two months after they had returned to Russia, during which time the room they had stayed in was of course used by a number of other guests.
Even after novichok was discovered in the hotel room, the police chose not to inform the owner of the hotel, who only became aware that his establishment had been contaminated with military grade nerve agent when this was announced to the public in September 2018.
This contrasts sharply with the way the authorities responded to other sites that they believed had been contaminated with novichok.
The Mill pub where Sergei and Yulia Skripal had had a drink was closed on 5 March, the day after their alleged poisoning, and remained closed for decontamination and refurbishment for more than a year.
Zizzi’s restaurant was ordered to close by the police on the same day and was closed for eight months.
Skripal’s house in Christie Miller Road had its roof timbers replaced in January 2019 and wasn’t declared decontaminated until March 2019.
The brand-new building in Amesbury where Charlie Rowley briefly lived and where he and Dawn collapsed was demolished in October 2020.
Murphy told the inquiry that when the public announcement was made that the hotel room in the City Stay hotel had been discovered to have been contaminated with novichok, he traced all the guests who had stayed there since the Russian secret agents left. It seems none had become ill while they were in the UK, and Murphy put “a plan in place” (Day 19, p189) whereby he could contact them in future if necessary — although how he would know when there might be any necessity from their point of view is not clear.
“That room had been in use since 4 March, so I did a lot of research into — I should say covert research nonetheless — into all those individuals that had stayed in that room in the intervening period,” Murphy said. “I then took some health and science advice to understand the implications for those individuals had the room potentially had higher levels of contamination… and was able to ascertain that those people were from all over the world.
“None — on the basis of what we could discover — had reported any illness at all before they left the country and so I was able to put a plan in place that meant that I could contact these individuals at some point in the future, explain their connection to the room and offer them the ability to access a doctor if necessary for some advice.
“Although none were ill [it] took a great deal of planning now to consider the health and safety implications for the public of a number of bookings in that room since [the two secret agents] left it [in March 2018] and our discovery in early May of Novichok.”
Perhaps Murphy and the police were less concerned about the novichok discovered at the City Stay hotel than they were about the contamination at places like The Mill pub or Zizzi’s restaurant because the levels of novichok found in the hotel room were apparently so low. Yet this same evidence — too insignificant to warrant warning hotel guests or decontaminating the room — was simultaneously significant enough to serve as a critical component in charging the Russian secret agents with attempted murder.
The traces of novichok that ‘MK26’ and DSTL Porton Down supposedly identified at the hotel were quite infinitesimally small — as they would have to be, for a nerve agent of such extraordinary toxicity to present no risk to the people who stayed in the room after the secret agents left.
The inquiry heard that if the traces of novichok had been any lower, the equipment used to detect it at DSTL Porton Down would not have been able to find it at all. ‘MK26’ reported this in one of their witness statements, and confirmed it in person when asked about it by O’Connor.
“The swab from the window latch and that taken from the bathroom sink were positive for the specific Novichok nerve agent at levels close to the limit of detection of the instruments used for the analysis,” ‘MK26’ stated (p20). “All other samples from the City Stay hotel were negative for the presence of the specific Novichok nerve agent.”
‘MK26’ is referring here to levels of nerve agent detected at a concentration of parts per billion, parts per trillion or even lower. This is because incredibly tiny amounts of a substance can be detected by modern mass spectrometry devices such as those that are available to the scientists at DSTL Porton Down. This means sub-microgram quantities of novichok — or nanogram levels — were allegedly discovered at the hotel, if they really were found at the limit of detection for such instruments of analysis.
Making a positive identification of a substance at such ultra-trace levels means rigorous validation is needed to ensure the results are accurate and false positives have not been created by environmental contamination, handling, preparation or other potential of sources of error. Minute amounts of background “noise”, such as cleaning chemicals for example, can potentially interfere with the results through what is called the matrix effect. In the case of the City Stay hotel, the room would have been cleaned multiple times by hotel staff before the swabs were taken.
This potential for error or cross-contamination emerged during the investigation when a “shaker” [a device in an isolated laboratory cabinet used to agitate samples as part of the extraction process] at DSTL Porton Down tested positive for trace levels of novichok — at similar levels to those allegedly found in the hotel room — while the samples were analysed.
Because the levels of contamination were similar, ‘MK26’ suggested that this was an anomalous result that didn’t invalidate the results from the hotel. MK26 suggested that the levels of novichok on the shaker should have been lower if they were the result of cross-contamination (Day 16, p162), and emphasised that the procedures and protocols at DSTL Porton Down to guard against cross-contamination were in any case extremely robust (Day 16, p73).
A second set of swabs was taken from the bathroom sink and the window latch in the room where the two secret agents had stayed, to establish if the results could be reproduced and confirmed. Reproducibility, of course, is a cornerstone of the scientific method, and confirmation is essential in forensic science if the evidence is to be admissible.
But this second set of samples came back negative.
‘MK26’ offered an explanation for this that was far from rigorous science, and could be described at best as a weak hypothesis. ‘MK26’ claimed that the first swabs had removed every trace of the evidence, effectively destroying it forever. Reproduction and confirmation of the result was therefore impossible.
“You describe in your statement that there was a second exercise, a repeat sampling of the room,” O’Connor says to ‘MK26’ (Day 16, p165). “Was that partly because of… concerns [that] had already arisen about possible cross contamination?
“It was to see whether or not we could find … further confirmatory samples,” ‘MK26’ replies. “The second sampling really focused on those areas where we had already found the positives, so we were just looking for further corroboration really and for completeness.”
“In fact, as you explain in your statement, the results of that second exercise were negative — were entirely negative — including from the window latch and bathroom sink areas that you had previously obtained the positive from,” O’Connor says. “Does that alter your assessment, your 95 per cent confidence about … the validity of those earlier readings?”
“No, it doesn’t change my assessment because the levels that we found on that first sampling visit were very low,” ‘MK26’ replies. “Therefore it is entirely conceivable that those areas that were contaminated, that contamination was removed in that first swabbing and if there was any at all that remained, it would have been below our limit of detection, and so we wouldn’t have found it.”
This critical evidence — the importance of which was emphasised by Cmdr Murphy in the context of the investigation and the charges made by the CPS, and by Giovannetti in showing that the secret agents had the means to make the attack on Sergei Skripal — appears to be a particle of nerve agent allegedly found at the concentration of one part per billion or less, by a laboratory that produced a false positive while looking for it, and which was so small the evidence was allegedly destroyed through testing.
It is no surprise that Giovannetti emphasised the expertise of ‘MK26’ and appealed to authority in her closing statements to Lord Hughes, saying he should accept the evidence of ‘MK26’ in full. The quality of the evidence in scientific terms was extremely poor, and its credibility depended heavily on the expert credentials of the witness presenting it.
But ‘MK26’ and DSTL Porton Down were to make even grander and more extraordinary claims to the inquiry on the basis of their expert credentials, with even less scientific grounds to support them.
>>Part 3: How Skripal trusted Putin, and the witnesses that didn’t appear
(Featured Image: crop of “D’Aubigny Turbeville (1696) & Ann (1694) Slate or Purbeck tablet” by Sarah Stierch is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)
