What happens when official evidence about a nerve agent death exists in impossible dual states? Part three of a three-part report on the Dawn Sturgess case examines elements simultaneously exceptional yet inadequate, visible yet hidden, cautious yet careless.
A note on sources: Links presented in bold go to specific timestamps in videos from the YouTube feed of the Dawn Sturgess inquiry. Links that are not in bold are to supporting mainstream sources.
Part 2 of this investigation revealed how key testimony and scientific evidence maintained striking contradictions: simultaneously present yet absent. Part 3 examines how this dual state extends to the heart of the inquiry and beyond.
Point 9. The tests that couldn’t be tested
After Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley separately collapsed at Rowley’s Amesbury flat on 30 June, it was four days before DSTL Porton Down publicly announced that they had both been poisoned by novichok — and it was another week before the fake perfume bottle that was apparently the source of the novichok was discovered in the kitchen of the flat on 11 July 2018.
During this time there was speculation in the media that the poison they had been exposed to could have been from the exact same source, or batch, as that allegedly used to contaminate Sergei Skripal’s front door in Salisbury four months previously. More than the fact that the poison in both cases was said to be novichok, the question was whether or not the novichok in both incidents could be shown to have been produced at the same time and the same place.
Linking the substances at Salisbury and Amesbury in this way — by establishing if they had the same “chemical signature” in the minute impurities that would have been introduced when the poison was manufactured, or precursor chemicals were combined — would be hugely significant for the investigation. It would provide a clear connection between the two incidents, and connect the poison in the Amesbury perfume bottle to the Salisbury incident even if the bottle that turned up in Amesbury had not actually been used to contaminate Skripal’s door.
On 4 July, DSTL Porton Down announced that its analysis of samples taken from Dawn and Charlie showed they had both been exposed to novichok. In an article about this development on 5 July, the BBC reported its security correspondent Gordon Corera as saying “the most likely hypothesis [is] that the Novichok was left over from the attack on the Skripals”.
“Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said [the police] could not confirm whether the nerve agent came from the same batch but the possibility was ‘clearly a line of inquiry’,” the BBC article stated.
Also on 5 July, the science correspondent for The Guardian Hannah Devlin published an article headlined “How likely is it that Amesbury novichok is from Skripal batch?”, where she speculated that it might be possible to link the two substances through chemical analysis, if the Amesbury substance was found in some kind of container and had not degraded.
“The latest novichok case raises the question of whether… Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were exposed to the same source of the nerve agent that poisoned… Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March,” Devlin wrote. “There has been no official comment on this question, but it is scientifically plausible that the agent might persist for long enough, particularly if it was contained in some way.”
Devlin goes on to cite Alistair Hay, the professor of toxicology we will remember from Part 1 with regard to his answer to the question of just how deadly novichok is supposed to be. Hay claims that Sergei and Yulia were unconscious in Salisbury hospital for a long time because the nerve agent takes a long time to break down in the body — but, as we now know, Yulia at least was not unconscious for a very long time, and was found by the hospital’s intensive care consultant Dr Cockroft to be “neurologically intact” when she woke up just four days after her alleged exposure to it.
Devlin also quotes Andrea Sella, a professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London. Her article in The Guardian continues:
“‘How long [novichok takes] to degrade is certainly not data that is publicly available, but from discussions with people at Porton Down, I understand they are slow to degrade,’ said Alastair Hay, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Leeds. “This is one of the reasons the Skripals were unconscious for so long — it doesn’t break down readily in the body.’”
“Access to a bulk sample would give scientists far more information than what they have been able to ascertain so far from blood samples from the Skripals and trace samples from their front door.
“‘There’s the feeling that there’s a little crock of forensic gold out there,’ Andrea Sella said. ‘That would give them a real chemical fingerprint which would give you far more information.’”
After the fake perfume bottle turned up in the Amesbury flat, Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry, published an article with the headline “Novichok poisoning breakthrough as original container found” on 18 July. In the article, Prof Sella was quoted again.
“Now that police have identified the bottle that was handled by the two latest victims they will be working to test whether the Novichok is from the same batch that poisoned the Skripals,” the Chemistry World article said.
“[Andrea] Sella says finding the bottle was a ‘major breakthrough’ in the investigation,” the article continues. “‘The discovery is a forensic gold mine,’ [Sella said]. ‘Not only is having a significant quantity of sample a real treasure trove to make detailed investigations of the sample, the bottle itself is likely to provide significant clues about its provenance.’”
On 13 July, two days after the bottle appeared, Stephen Morris of The Guardian emphasised the political significance of the analytical work that was being carried out on its contents. “Chemical weapons experts at Porton Down were testing the substance to see if it was from the same batch as used in Britain four months earlier — a finding that carries huge diplomatic implications,” he wrote.
An OPCW team was summoned to the UK again and stayed from 15–18 July 2018 to provide “technical assistance”. They were asked to re-test the samples taken from Sturgess and Rowley and once again confirm DTSL Porton Down’s discovery of the presence of novichok, which they duly did.
But curiously the OPCW team wasn’t given access to the bottle that had apparently been found in Rowley’s flat just four days before they arrived. The OPCW had to make yet another visit to the UK almost a month later, on 13 August, to get samples from that.
Despite the anticipation of defence and science correspondents in the media and Andrea Sella’s prediction that the Amesbury bottle would be a treasure trove of information, it wasn’t.
When the OPCW published its report on 4 September 2018, it said that the results of the comparative analysis it had made between the contents of the Amesbury bottle and the samples it had previously taken in Salisbury were inconclusive.
“Due to the unknown storage conditions of the small bottle found in the house of Mr Rowley and the fact that the environmental samples analysed in relation to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal… were exposed to the environment and moisture, the impurity profiles of the samples available to the OPCW do not make it possible to draw conclusions as to whether the samples are from the same synthesis batch,” the OPCW said.
The UK’s leading political representatives appeared to ignore the OPCW’s disappointingly inconclusive report, and in fact seemed to misrepresent its results. Their advisers had perhaps decided that the determination novichok was supposedly present at both Salisbury and Amesbury was sufficient to suggest to the world at large that OPCW analysis had showed both occurrences were from the “exact same” batch: but that was an extraordinarily deceptive phrase to use.
The UK prime minister at the time, Theresa May, made a statement to members of parliament on 5 September claiming that “[y]esterday’s report from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, has confirmed that the exact same chemical nerve agent was used in both [the Salisbury and Amesbury] cases.”
A very similar statement was made to the United Nations on 7 September by Karen Pierce, then the UK’s ambassador to the UN. “The OPCW independent experts have confirmed the identifications as Novichok nerve agent, and it is the exact same chemical that was used in both attacks,” she said. “It stretches credulity the identification of such nerve agent twice in close proximity to be a coincidence.”
Perhaps May and Pierce were being told what to say, and did not know their emphatic statements made on domestic and international stages were not statements that the OPCW’s analysis of the Amesbury bottle’s contents supported.
To anyone who had been paying attention, however, the inconclusive nature of the report was impossible to fully obfuscate or avoid.
Chemistry World published an article on 6 September imprecisely headlined “Nerve agent confirmed as identical in both UK poisonings as key suspects identified” but, in the body of the article, it accurately reported that “[i]mpurities in the nerve agent samples taken from the Skripals and the unknown storage conditions of the bottle… made it difficult for the OPCW to conclude whether the two nerve agents originated from the same batch.
“Consequently, the agency was not able to conclude from its chemical analysis that both poisonings were definitely caused by the nerve agent discovered in the counterfeit perfume bottle,” the article said.
This seemed to be the end of the road for the prospect of conclusively linking the substances allegedly found in Salisbury and Amesbury through batch analysis, because the laboratories that the OPCW uses to conduct analysis of this kind — a process that typically involves multiple laboratories in different countries testing splits of the same samples, with the laboratories assigned these tasks kept secret from the public and from one another — are among the best staffed and equipped in the world.
The OPCW carries out such secret, multiple-blinded testing using selected “designated laboratories” — of which DSTL Porton Down is the UK’s only one. There are only around 30 laboratories in the world that have achieved OPCW designation, which is awarded after a rigorous process of proficiency testing that must be repeated yearly if a laboratory is to retain its accreditation by the chemical weapons watchdog.
DSTL Porton Down was of course not used by the OPCW to re-test the Salisbury and Amesbury samples, because it was the UK laboratory’s findings that the OPCW had been called in to reproduce and confirm.
As part of OPCW proficiency testing, laboratories that are seeking to achieve or maintain their position as a designated laboratory are given 15 calendar days to report results on test samples that are provided to them by the OPCW, with “identification of target compounds… ideally… based on at least two different analytical techniques”.
These would include the extremely sensitive mass spectrometry techniques we have discussed in part 2 with reference to the novichok traces that were supposedly found in the London hotel where the two Russian secret agents stayed.
This two-week turnaround, which OPCW designated laboratories are also expected to achieve in real testing scenarios such as the Salisbury and Amesbury cases, is only part of the exhaustive proficiency testing that laboratories are required to pass to achieve or maintain their designated status.
In short: from the point of view of the UK’s investigation into the novichok poisonings, if a set of OPCW designated laboratories around the world could not conclusively establish that the Salisbury and Amesbury samples were from the same batch, no scientific establishment would be able to do so.
However, the Dawn Sturgess inquiry heard that DSTL Porton Down seemingly did not give up its analytical efforts in this regard after the OPCW issued its inconclusive report in September, and eventually achieved something remarkable.
In an extraordinary revelation that received almost no attention, the inquiry was told that DSTL Porton Down had in fact eventually succeeded in doing what no other OPCW designated laboratory had been able to do. It took some time, but the scientists at DSTL Porton Down were apparently able to finally find Sella’s “crock of forensic gold” when every other OPCW laboratory that had been asked to do so had failed.
The inquiry heard that DSTL Porton Down was able to do this because 15 days is insufficient for OPCW designated laboratories to do the kind of chemical analysis that scientists such as the anonymous expert ‘MK26’, the lead DSTL scientific advisor to the police investigations, and his colleagues had been able carry out.
It had taken more than 15 days for DSTL Porton Down there to achieve the breakthrough that defence and scientific correspondents in the media had been looking forward to six years earlier — although exactly how much more time the scientists there had needed to make their incredible discovery was not disclosed.
“Detailed analytical work has been undertaken to determine whether the material recovered from the handle of the Skripal home at Christie Miller Road is from the same batch of the specific Novichok as that recovered from the perfume bottle at Muggleton Road,” ‘MK26’ wrote in a statement to the inquiry that was prepared in July 2024 and signed in October 2024 (p24, par 48).
“This work has concluded that it is highly likely that not only is the identity of the chemical agent found on the door handle at Christie Miller Road and within the perfume bottle recovered from 9 Muggleton Road identical, but that the Novichok at both locations is from the same batch of Novichok prepared at the time, from the same pre-cursor chemicals,” the statement continues.
“Given my opinion that the material recovered from the door handle at 47 Christie Miller Road and the liquid recovered from the bottle found at 9 Muggleton Road are highly likely to have come from the same batch of Novichok, and the volume of material recovered in the perfume bottle, it is my opinion that it is a realistic possibility that the bottle recovered from 9 Muggleton Road was used to apply the material to the door handle of the Skripal property at 47 Christie Miller Road.
“However, given the scientific evidence available to me, it is not possible to exclude the possibility that a second bottle of the same batch of Novichok was used in the attack on the Skripals, and that the bottle found at 9 Muggleton Road was a second bottle which was then discarded.”
We have discussed in Part 1 the “volume of material recovered” from the bottle with reference to Lisa Giovannetti KC’s superficial approach to the evidence — when she ignored the fact Rowley supposedly spilled some of the liquid on his hands — and we also observed there how the idea of the Amesbury bottle being a “second bottle” that was unused and discarded is merely a suggestion that maintains a narrative, without any evidence to support it.
But what is far more significant from the statement ‘MK26’ submitted to the inquiry is their claim that DSTL Porton Down had found that “the Novichok at both locations [was highly likely] from the same batch of Novichok prepared at the time, from the same pre-cursor chemicals” — and Giovannetti picked up on this critical point in her closing statement to Lord Hughes, calling it a “safe” conclusion.
“As to [the] scientific evidence, as a result of detailed analytical work, we say you can safely conclude that the Novichok recovered from the door handle of the Skripal home at Christie Miller Road is not just the same kind, but from the same batch as that recovered from the perfume bottle at Muggleton Road,” Giovannetti said.
“[It was] made in a single synthesis, from the same precursor compounds at the same time — and that’s a key finding.”
It was indeed a key finding: an extremely important discovery with “huge diplomatic implications” as Stephen Morris of The Guardian said it would have six years previously.
It was a finding that should have been declared to and validated by the OPCW and widely reported by the media and the UK’s political representatives.
But it appears the opposite was the case. The inquiry heard that how the scientists at DSTL Porton Down achieved their extraordinary breakthrough was a secret that could not be discussed in open session, with no suggestion that the OPCW had been involved to validate their results.
‘MK26’ was asked about DSTL Porton Down’s remarkable achievement — and his account of it in his written statement — when he gave personal testimony to the inquiry (Day 16, p178).
“You say: ‘Detailed analytical work has been undertaken to determine whether the material recovered from the door handle of the Skripal home at Christie Miller Road is from the same batch of the specific Novichok as that recovered from the perfume bottle at 9 Muggleton Road’,” lead counsel O’Connor says to ‘MK26’, asking: “I think we probably all know what we mean by the same batch, but perhaps you can explain exactly what you mean.”
“My interpretation, or my meaning from the same batch, is that it was from a single synthesis of that Novichok made from the same pre-cursor compounds at the same time,” ‘MK26’ replies, continuing:
“[It is highly likely] that not only is the identity of the chemical agent found on the door handle at Christie Miller Road and within the perfume bottle recovered from 9 Muggleton Road identical, but that the Novichok at both locations is from the same batch of Novichok prepared at the same time, from the same precursor chemicals.”
“Are you able to go any further in open [session] in explaining your reasoning?” O’Connor asks.
“Very little,” ‘MK26’ replies. “I guess what I would add is that the OPCW process requires the laboratories that receive the samples to report within a fixed period of time and… the high levels of purity of the sample mean that in order to look at batch matching, what we’re talking about is analysis of those very low-level impurities.
“That takes a substantial amount of time and… that’s probably all I can say as to why we were able to reach a conclusion that the OPCW was not. I’m happy to provide more detail in closed [session].”
“I’m certainly not going to press you to provide any more detail,” O’Connor says. “But I think it follows from what you have said… [that] your positive conclusion about the same batch is one… that you’re quite comfortable with [despite] the fact that the OPCW was unable to reach a conclusion?”
“Yes,” ‘MK26’ replies.
The implications of what ‘MK26’ is confirming here are profound. He is apparently saying that the strict 15 day turnaround that the OPCW demands from its designated laboratories is in effect a flaw in the chemical weapons watchdog’s protocols and procedures.
Although this requirement is intended by the OPCW to establish the operational efficiency and reliability of designated laboratories and allow for timely decisions to be made relating to chemical weapons incidents, in cases like Amesbury and Salisbury it appears more time is needed — and DSTL Porton Down, operating independently outside of the restrictions imposed on OPCW designated laboratories, was somehow able to achieve what such laboratories could not.
The OPCW, of course, carries out testing with strict secrecy and there is no reason why DSTL Porton Down would not have been able to report its findings to the OPCW and have its results fully validated and reproduced by other designated OPCW laboratories. This would seem to be imperative, given that these laboratories had collectively failed to achieve any kind of definitive result in their initial analyses of the Amesbury and Salisbury samples in 2018.
But there is no suggestion that anything like this was done. As with the supposed discovery of novichok in the hotel where the two Russian secret agents stayed, scientific principles such as validation and reproduction do not appear to have been required — and do not even appear to have been possible.
Once again the inquiry was asked to accept the authority of DSTL Porton Down and the opinion of ‘MK26’ on the basis of their supposedly expert scientific credentials — rather than the exercise of the scientific method itself — when it came to the batch analysis of novichok.
DSTL Porton Down, it seems, is simply better at chemical weapons analysis than any other OPCW designated laboratory in the world.
But what of the person allegedly targeted by this chemical weapon — the person whose apparent attempted assassination seemingly led to the death of Dawn Sturgess and the inquiry that eventually followed?
Where was Sergei Skripal in all of this and what did he have to say?
Point 10. Skripal trusted Putin but didn’t trust him
Although he was the principal figure in the events apparently leading directly to the death of Dawn Sturgess, Sergei Skripal was not required to give testimony in person before the inquiry — not even in secret, closed session via secure video link from a safe house somewhere.
Unlike his daughter, there was no public statement to camera from Sergei after he was discharged from hospital. He simply disappeared from view, and has never been seen since.
Until the inquiry, there had not even been a written statement released in Skripal’s name about what had supposedly happened to him in Salisbury on 4 March 2018.
Sergei and Yulia did not give personal testimony to the inquiry because Lord Hughes ruled before the proceedings began that any kind of appearance from them would expose them to further risk of assassination by Russian secret agents: a risk that the UK authorities had apparently not taken seriously or even acknowledged before the Salisbury events.
This risk was apparently manageable from the UK authorities’ point of view when Yulia made her public appearance in May 2018 — but now, six years later, the supposed danger was deemed too severe for her or her father to appear before the inquiry in any way.
“[You concluded that] the risk of physical attack by whomever it might be on one or both of them… clearly outweighed the advantage to the Inquiry of [the Skripals] attending to give oral evidence,” lead counsel O’Connor said on the first day of the hearings (Day 1, p23)
Michael Mansfield KC, representing the family, developed this point in his opening remarks.
“It is notable that the Skripals are not being called to give evidence in this inquiry primarily… because the risk is too great that their identities and locations could be discoverable,” Mansfield told Lord Hughes (Day 1, p118). “[This] risk [is] said to be the same as the attack in Salisbury. If so, why was a similar precautionary approach not adopted by the authorities [in 2011, when Skripal arrived in Salisbury] in the way that you have?”
This is the question that the inquiry was nominally set up to answer. Points arising from the novichok narrative such as those we have looked at in the three parts of this article were — as we have seen — largely incidental to the inquiry, however significant they may or may not appear to have been to the reader. For the inquiry, the established narrative was never in doubt.
Rather, what Mansfield and the Sturgess family wanted to know from the inquiry was why precautions were not initially taken to protect Sergei from potential reprisal attacks. Why had UK intelligence not considered Sergei to be at risk of assassination by the Russian state in retribution for his betrayal of his country as a double agent in the 1990s, after he arrived in Salisbury?
Sergei had served several years in a Russian prison after being caught and convicted of high treason and espionage in 2006. He was released in 2010 as part of a spy swap between Russia and the United States, and had received a presidential pardon before being exiled to the UK — but it was implicit in the inquiry’s proceedings that none of this really meant anything.
From the inquiry’s point of view, Russian President Putin was notorious for his jealous, irrational determination to exact retribution on traitors, wherever they may be and however much time may have elapsed since their apparent crimes, and he was capable of ordering their assassination at any time — even at times when this was particularly detrimental to Russia’s efforts to present itself positively on the world stage.
We will look at the idea of President Putin’s “bad character” again at the end of this article.
The inquiry also heard that Sergei had apparently “re-entered the game” following the spy swap that brought him to Salisbury, and was actively supplying information of some kind about Russia to Western intelligence services (Day 24, p16) at the time of the alleged assassination attempt against him. This was apparently the primary reason for the attack, although what useful intelligence Skripal could possibly still have almost 15 years after he was exposed as a double agent and arrested in Russia is not clear.
From the Sturgess family’s point of view, precautions taken by the UK state to protect Sergei would, by extension, have been precautions that protected people like Dawn from the risk a Russian traitor living openly in Salisbury presented to the local community, given that it was now generally understood he could have been attacked by the Russian state at any time.
The question of the precautions that should have been taken by the UK state to protect Sergei extended to the question of how much danger he personally felt he was in living in Salisbury, and what precautions he felt were reasonable or necessary to have taken himself.
To address these concerns Sergei apparently provided a statement to the inquiry, breaking his public silence of more than six years — but the written testimony he gave was strangely contradictory when it came to the question of his own protection or that of his family. In keeping with the theme we have explored through this article, he was apparently concerned and simultaneously quite unconcerned by the danger he may have been in.
It is worth noting here that Sergei’s statement, seemingly made in October 2024, was presented to the inquiry unsigned and undated, which generally speaking would make it inadmissible in UK law. Yulia similarly apparently submitted an unsigned and undated statement.
But we will leave the implications of this to one side, as the inquiry seems to have done.
On the one hand, Skripal was apparently worried about potential reprisals against him by the Russian state, and recalled that he had apparently told his friends in Salisbury that he knew Russian leader Putin “personally” and Putin would “get him” (p5, par 16). In his police interviews in 2018 he apparently even said he was “a very important man of special services. Still now I know a lot of Russian secrets, top secrets. They are really dangerous for Russian special services”. (Day 1, p77).
But on the other hand, Skripal was seemingly not prepared to take even the most basic and obvious steps to protect himself or his family in terms of the way he lived his life in Salisbury, as Mansfield pointed out.
“Mr Skripal suggests [in his statement] that he was offered a change of name but was never told this was needed,” Mansfield told the inquiry (Day 1, p115). “[He] was living openly with his family in the United Kingdom under his own name in a Salisbury cul de sac. Why? Why was he not given a different identity at an unknown and varied location?
“Mr Skripal’s address was alarmingly accessible to the GRU’s assassins. Why? Why was he not accommodated in a gated estate or at least within an apartment block requiring an entry code and appropriate security? […] There is no evidence that his property was equipped with… sensor cameras, CCTV. [R]eading the interviews that [was because] he didn’t want to make himself conspicuous. He is living under his own name.
“None of this makes sense for the authorities to have allowed this to develop in the way that it did. These are the most basic of protective measures. In their absence, GRU agents simply walked up to his front door, applied a deadly nerve agent to the handle… and left. The most rudimentary home security monitoring would have identified them.”
Mansfield was right to say Skripal’s reasons for refusing to have CCTV installed at Christie Miller Road did not make sense. And while a Russian presidential pardon may not have carried any weight as far as the inquiry was concerned, from Skripal’s point of view at least the implicit protocol of the spy swap that brought him to the UK was seemingly meaningful.
“I do not remember concretely what was covered in discussions about my personal security arrangements, but I believe I was offered protection, including changing my name,” Sergei’s statement reads (p7, par 27). “It was never suggested that this was a necessary option and I decided against it.
“I had received a Presidential pardon from the Russian state and wanted to lead as normal a life as possible, including maintaining my personal and family relationships. I did not think, and it was not suggested, that I needed to live in a gated community or a block of flats. Christie Miller Road was a quiet street built for police officers. Several neighbours were ex-police. Residents knew and kept an eye out for each other. I felt quite safe there.
“I did not have a house security alarm or sensor activated security lights and I do not remember either of these being raised with me. CCTV was recommended but I declined this because I did not want to make my house conspicuous or live under surveillance.”
Sergei’s remark that he felt CCTV would make his house conspicuous is particularly notable. By 2018 domestic CCTV systems were commonplace and unremarkable in the UK, so this was a very strange rationale.
To briefly illustrate this point: the inquiry heard testimony from Ross and Maureen Cassidy, residents of Salisbury who became close friends of Sergei’s, and whose son Russell did maintenance work on Sergei’s home.
The Cassidys drove Sergei to Heathrow airport to collect Yulia on Saturday 3 March, the day before the alleged poisoning. They then drove them both back to Salisbury, arriving at around 6pm — a time Maureen Cassidy stated that she had established “because I… checked my son Russell’s CCTV footage after we became aware of what had happened” (unsigned statement, p10).
This shows how common domestic CCTV systems were at the time — and Russell Cassidy can hardly have believed himself to be at personal risk in the way a retired Russian double agent like Skripal should surely have considered a possibility.
There is another perspective on Sergei’s security arrangements that his journey with the Cassidys to Heathrow to collect Yulia reveals.
As we know, the two Russian secret agents who supposedly contaminated Skripal’s front door handle with novichok on Sunday 4 March also visited Salisbury on the afternoon of the day before, and Commander Murphy of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command told the inquiry that he believed this was for the purposes of reconnaissance.
But O’Connor suggested to him that the secret agents had chosen Saturday afternoon because they were monitoring Skripal’s communications, and knew that he was going to be out of the house at the time.
“If on your assessment it was a reconnaissance visit, then it would have been convenient, or less risky to do so when there was no danger of Sergei Skripal leaving or arriving at the house, or looking out of the window, or anything like that?” O’Connor asks Murphy (Day 19, p133).
“Entirely fair, yes,” Murphy replies.
“We have heard evidence… not only that Sergei Skripal went to Heathrow on that Saturday, but that he was discussing the timings of his trip… for example with Ross Cassidy on the phone,” O’Connor says. “With that in mind, Commander, is there anything you can say in open session about a suggestion that it may have been no coincidence that [this] reconnaissance visit… took place whilst no one was at home, that in fact [the Russian secret agents] may have known, perhaps by targeting of communications, that Sergei Skripal would be away that day?”
“As much as I can say is that we did not find evidence within the devices that we have identified to indicate that level of contact, but that’s as much as I’m afraid I’m able to say in open,” Murphy replies, apparently indicating that the police had found no evidence after taking apart the Skripals’ telephones that they had been physically bugged.
In his statement, Skripal acknowledged the possibility that his communications could have been monitored by the Russian state (p2, par 5), and the inquiry heard that he was in the habit of screening his calls using an answering machine (Day 6, p17). But his statement overlooked the fact that his Salisbury address had been registered in his own name in the UK land registry when the house was purchased, and was publicly available to anyone who was willing to pay a small fee to search the land registry database.
“I am not now, and have never been, aware of the Russian authorities intercepting my communications after I came to Great Britain,” Skripal’s statement reads (p2, par 5). “[But] I know every country tries to monitor communications and I believe it is possible that Russia did so.
“My family may have been of interest to the Russian authorities because I was once a senior man in the GRU special services; Russia’s military intelligence agency. The Russian government might have tried to intercept my communications but I am not sure if they succeeded.
“I do not know if they found out where I lived in this way or another way.”
O’Connor’s suggestion that the Russian secret agents knew Skripal would be out on Saturday afternoon so they went to Salisbury to carry out reconnaissance “when there was no danger of Sergei Skripal leaving or arriving at the house, or looking out of the window, or anything like that” is interesting because the following day they allegedly approached Skripal’s house to poison his front door while he was at home.
Not only this but the inquiry heard that they did so in broad daylight, shortly after 12pm — a time when, according to internet usage data that the police had obtained and that was presented to the inquiry, Sergei was apparently viewing YouTube videos on his desktop computer — (see police document here, p21 par 6.3) — a computer that was located in his office, a converted garage with a window that looks out onto the cul-de-sac and the approach to his house.
The inquiry was shown a floorplan of the building, where the position of his desk relative to the window is shown (see p39 of the police document here, room 6). Sergei would have had a clear view of the street as his two would-be assassins walked up to his front door.
Ross Cassidy had told the media on several occasions in the past that his friend was very watchful. In September 2018 he told the Daily Mail that he personally doubted the idea that the two Russian secret agents could have approached Sergei’s home without being seen, and that Sergei had almost always seen him before he arrived at the front door when he visited.
“These guys are professional assassins,” Cassidy said. “It would have been far too brazen for them to have walked down a dead-end cul-de-sac in broad daylight on a Sunday lunchtime.
“Sergei’s house faces up the cul-de-sac. He had a converted garage that he used as his office — this gives a full view of the street. Almost always, Sergei used to open the door to us before we had chance to knock. Whenever we visited, he’d see us approaching.
“Something had spooked Sergei in the weeks prior to the attack. He was twitchy, I don’t know why, and he even changed his mobile phone.”
Whether or not something had “spooked” Sergei in the weeks prior to the alleged attack as Cassidy claimed, the inquiry heard that he had indeed changed his phone in the days before the alleged attack (Day 6, p29). In his statement to the inquiry Sergei claimed that this was because the battery on his old phone had started to lose charge rapidly, and had nothing to do with concerns that it may have been being monitored.
Either way, and even if by chance, this represented more operational security from Sergei’s point of view than had been exercised by the two secret agents who allegedly walked up to his front door that Sunday lunchtime and contaminated it with military grade nerve agent without him seeing them as he sat at his window with a full view of their approach.
As we know, the Russian secret agents hadn’t bothered to change their phones since the last time they used booking.com to book a room at their favourite City Stay hotel.
In June 2020, Cassidy repeated his views to The Sunday Times.
“Sergei saw you coming before you ever saw him,” he said.
Point 11. Important witnesses who weren’t important
Sergei Skripal was far from being the only important witness who did not appear before the inquiry, although he is the most obvious example. His daughter Yulia did not appear either, for the same reasons: Lord Hughes ruled a personal appearance — even by secure video link from an undisclosed location, during closed sessions — would also put her at risk of assassination from Russian secret agents like the Russian secret agents who had tried and failed to kill her and her father years before.
But there are many others who were conspicuous by their absence. To recap on the three other key witnesses discussed in this article who could have given oral testimony but for whatever reason did not, first there is Charlie Rowley, who supposedly gave Dawn the bottle that killed her and upon whose highly contradictory account of doing so the narrative of a discarded bottle of Russian nerve agent largely depends.
Then there is Sam Hobson, Rowley’s friend who was with him when he collapsed in his flat in Amesbury, and who Rowley was initially convinced had poisoned him there. Rowley was excused from giving personal testimony because of his alcoholism and drug addiction or “vulnerability” — his statement however indicated that he “currently [does] not take any drugs (Day 3, p52) — but there was no explanation offered as to why an important witness like Hobson, who like Rowley gave television interviews at the time of the Amesbury incident, was not required to appear.
And then there is Karl Bulpitt, the paramedic who accidentally gave Sergei Skripal atropine in the back of the ambulance believing he was giving him a different drug entirely, or so the inquiry was told.
The fact that atropine happens to be a drug that is supposedly effective against a nerve agent like novichok meant that Bulpitt’s mistake was offered as an explanation for Sergei’s survival — or perhaps, implicitly, as an explanation for why he arrived at hospital in a significantly better state than his daughter, who was apparently exposed to a lower dose of the poison after touching it second.
The fact that Bulpitt was only required to give written testimony, when several other paramedics appeared before the inquiry, is all the more remarkable when we recall that this written testimony was entered into evidence by the inquiry at the end of a sitting day without remark, and was then reported by Stephen Morris of The Guardian as if Bulpitt had given it in person. This was an extraordinary sleight of hand for a reporter writing for a mainstream and supposedly reputable outlet to have made.
There are other important witnesses who only gave written testimony to the inquiry — and a number of important witnesses who were not required to give testimony at all.
Retired Detective Chief Inspector Philip Murphy also only gave a written statement, which was undated and unsigned. The inquiry heard (Day 3, p2) that Murphy played a important role in the investigation of the Amesbury poisonings, but having retired in 2021 he was effectively represented to the inquiry by Cmdr Dominic Murphy. Why DCI Philip Murphy’s retirement excused him from giving evidence before the inquiry was not made clear; Detective Inspector Mant gave testimony to the inquiry, for example, even though he is also now retired (Day 14, p3).
Colonel Alison McCourt was also excused from giving personal testimony, supplying a signed written statement instead. Col McCourt, the British Army’s most senior nurse at the time of the Salisbury incident, was one of the first responders to Sergei and Yulia at the bench, together with her daughter. Some months later she nominated her daughter Abigail for a bravery award organised by a local radio station, as Abigail was apparently the first to notice the Skripals in distress.
Lord Hughes excused Col McCourt from giving oral testimony because she said her involvement in the Salisbury incident had damaged her health, an injury for which she was continuing to receive treatment. This was not due to the effects of novichok — which she and her daughter could easily have been unknowingly contaminated with as they attended to the Skripals — as tests subsequently showed that they were unharmed.
Rather, the suggestion appears to be that the injury was to McCourt’s mental health. Her statement indicates she did not realise nominating her daughter for a bravery award would “expose my family and I to national media attention and resultant conspiracy theorists” (p2, par 14), and she also describes her distress when her car was taken away by the authorities a week after she and her daughter had given the Skripals first aid.
“I was told by police that my car did not need to be examined and there was no safety concern and I could continue driving it,” McCourt’s statement reads. “Then a week after the incident the police turned up at our house at 9pm without warning and confiscated our car keys and returned subsequently with the Army to remove our family car under full ‘biohazard’ conditions. I found this extremely distressing as my family and I had been using the car unprotected throughout the intervening period.”
Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who did give testimony before the inquiry, had previously described to The Telegraph similar mental trauma in an interview he gave to the newspaper together with his wife, Sarah. All their family’s possessions were destroyed by the authorities because Bailey had apparently contaminated them before he went to hospital, and the family was not allowed to return to their home.
“‘There could have been a speck of Novichok in the house,’” The Telegraph reports Bailey as saying. ‘At some point in the next month, year, or 10 years, somebody could have touched it.’
The article continues: “‘It felt a little bit over the top, if I’m honest,’ says Sarah, who had initially stayed in the house for five days after her husband fell ill. ‘Nobody explained what was going on. We never dreamt we wouldn’t get any of our things back. I feel a real sense of guilt about the stuff we can’t replace, which I should have saved, like first drawings and baby shoes. It really haunts me.’”
Another very significant witness among the individuals who were not called by the inquiry to give testimony of any kind was Dr Christine Blanshard, the medical director of Salisbury District Hospital at the time of the Salisbury and Amesbury incidents.
As we have seen, Blanshard punished the hospital’s ICU consultant Dr Stephen Cockroft for the crime of communicating with Yulia when she recovered consciousness four days after her alleged poisoning. She removed Cockroft from the ICU rota and threatened him with a charge of professional misconduct if he spoke to any of his colleagues about what had happened.
Given that the inquiry’s nominal purpose was to establish whether any measures could or should have been taken to protect people like Dawn from the risk of collateral damage presented by a potential target of the Russian state living nearby, and that Cockroft was prevented from telling his medical colleagues about what he had observed following the Salisbury incident but before the Amesbury incident occurred, this seems like a critical failure by the inquiry.
Blanshard should have been called on to explain why she prevented Cockroft from telling his colleagues what had happened, as this could have significantly informed their response to Dawn’s diagnosis and treatment when she was later admitted to hospital. Cockroft was explicit about this point in his statement and in his testimony, describing meetings of medical and professional staff where he was blocked by Blanshard from speaking.
The second meeting, at a lecture theatre in the hospital on 21 June 2018, was particularly significant because, as Cockroft told the inquiry, “almost all the doctors in the emergency department there, certainly almost all my anaesthetic and intensive care colleagues, plus other specialties and a lot of intensive care nursing” (Day 9, p44).
“This would have been an ideal opportunity to discuss how the Skripals presented and, you know, share the secret, as it were,” Cockroft said. His written statement continues: “There were some one hundred Salisbury Hospital medical and nursing staff in the audience but I was given no opportunity to discuss my experiences in recognising and treating Novichok poisoning. The medical director [Dr Blanshard] prevented me from volunteering any of this information.”
Another colleague of Dr Cockroft’s who should have been called to give testimony before the inquiry was his fellow ICU consultant Dr Stephen Davies. Dr Davies is significant because, in the aftermath of the Salisbury incident, he decided to write a letter to The Times newspaper to allay the fears of the people living in Salisbury — and the wider public — about the risk of being contaminated by the novichok that had allegedly been used in the city.
There was clearly a great deal of anxiety being felt by the local population at the time, and Dr Davies apparently sought to reassure people after the The Times published an article on 14 March 2018 reporting that “[n]early 40 people ha[d] experienced symptoms related to the Salisbury nerve agent poisoning”.
On 16 March 2018, The Times published his letter, where Dr Davies wrote:
“Sir, Further to your report (“Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment”, Mar 14), may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning. Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed. None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved.”
This was newsworthy enough for The Times to follow Dr Davies’s letter up with an article headlined “Russia: Salisbury poison fears allayed by doctor”, in which Fiona Hamilton, then the newspaper’s crime and security editor (now its chief reporter) and Deborah Haynes, then its defence editor (now security and defence editor at Sky News) reported that “Dozens of patients who went to hospital after the Salisbury poisoning were unaffected by the nerve agent [novichok]”.
Dr Davies’s letter becomes even more interesting because Rob Slane — the Salisbury resident who blogged as The Blogmire, and who we mentioned in part 1 with reference to the inquiry’s suggestion that the two Russian secret agents had a portable heat sealer with them — did the necessary journalism that Hamilton and Haynes signally failed to do and contacted Dr Davies to ask him about it.
This direct contact with the letter’s author revealed yet another contradiction: a medical professional’s attempt to provide clarity had apparently been rendered unclear through editorial intervention, with no subsequent correction despite the public health implications.
Slane reported that Dr Davies “told me that The Times edited his letter, and that this produced a misleading message. Furthermore, he confirmed to me that the three patients mentioned in his letter ‘were poisoned with a nerve agent, confirmed by blood tests and symptoms’.”
As with so many details relating to the novichok narrative, this statement raises more questions than it answers. What did Dr Davies’s letter say before it was edited and in what way was it edited to make it misleading? Importantly, Dr Davies was apparently writing to The Times to reassure people that there was no risk of contamination to the public as a result of the alleged novichok attack in Salisbury. Was this not in fact the case? If not, the way his letter was edited amounted to it being turned into dangerous misinformation.
No apology, correction or retraction was published by The Times, and the article by Fiona Hamilton and Deborah Haynes was not amended. Dr Davies could have provided clarification on this important matter of the risk to the public as well as other points relating to the treatment of Sergei and Yulia Skripal if he had appeared before the inquiry, but he was not required to do so.
Illustrating how important this issue is, at one point Straw, the barrister for the family, told the inquiry that a total of 87 people went to the A&E department at Salisbury hospital because they were anxious about symptoms following the alleged use of novichok in the city — and although Cmdr Murphy described these people as the “worried well” (Day 18, p12), that statistic was broadcast to the UK by Channel Four News on 2 December 2024 in a report that did not mention the fact that none of these 87 people had actually suffered novichok poisoning, or poisoning of any kind.
Point 12. The trial that wasn’t a trial
As someone who has written about the Salisbury and Amesbury novichok incidents with a degree of scepticism, I have occasionally been challenged on social media to present an alternative version of events to the narrative that has been advanced by the UK authorities — a narrative that was accepted without question by the Dawn Sturgess inquiry and its participants, as we have seen.
The suggestion is that, without a complete alternative explanation for what happened, a sceptical attitude to the novichok events as they have been presented to us can be dismissed as groundless and without merit. From a rational point of view this is obviously untrue — it’s often possible to see the answer to a question is wrong without having enough information to know what the correct answer is.
Expressing such scepticism has also been presented as disseminating Russian disinformation or “following the Kremlin playbook”. Mark Urban, the ex-BBC journalist and author of The Skripal Files, made this accusation against me in November 2024 on Twitter/X, complaining that I had misrepresented him when I quoted a passage from the first edition of his book on that platform, but illustrated it with a picture of the cover of the second edition.
“He generally follows the Russian embassy playbook of questioning the ‘official narrative’ but I’ve never seen him produce a coherent one of his own,” Urban posted.
I don’t have the contacts in the UK security establishment that Urban does, and I can’t offer a complete, coherent alternative version of events. But the demand that sceptical analysis must provide a full alternative explanation fundamentally misunderstands how evidence-based inquiry works. Again: one can identify inconsistencies, contradictions and gaps in evidence without necessarily knowing the full truth of what occurred.
However, a counter-narrative to that presented in The Skripal Files and the mainstream media in general might begin by asking what the two secret agents were doing in Salisbury if they were not there on an assassination mission.
And here it would be important to start by acknowledging that the behaviour of the secret agents while they visiting the UK over the weekend of 2–4 March 2018 was — by any measure — peculiar.
According to the inquiry, the Russian secret agents did not just visit Skripal’s house in Salisbury on the Saturday afternoon for reconnaissance purposes while Sergei was out picking up Yulia from Heathrow airport, and then again at Sunday lunchtime to poison the front door handle while Sergei and Yulia were at home, but they returned to Christie Miller Road yet again on Sunday afternoon having poisoned the door, apparently to observe Sergei and Yulia touching the novichok that they had applied about an hour previously.
“During their second visit [to Christie Miller Road] Sergei and Yulia were departing the premises at that time and so there was more activity around the time of that departure,” Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry (Day 19, p157). “So of the two visits [to the house on Sunday it] makes entirely sense for them [sic; to have contaminated the door on the first visit] to ensure that [the novichok] was there before Sergei and Yulia left the house at 1.30.”
“The second [visit to Christie Miller Road on Sunday]… it would seem [was] just in time to witness them leaving,” O’Connor says (Day 19, p176).
“Coincides,” Murphy replies in agreement.
While the two Russian secret agents’ movements around Salisbury on the day of the alleged poisoning — including, as we have seen, disassembling and then packaging their assassination weapon using a portable heat sealer before dumping it — may seem odd, they are nothing compared to how they behaved about six months after they returned to Moscow, when they appeared on the Russian state-owned television channel RT and were interviewed by its editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan.
At this point the two secret agents had seemingly had their real identities exposed by an organisation of “citizen journalists”. This organisation had apparently purchased leaked Russian passport databases, and had used them to establish that the secret agents had been using fake passports issued to the Russian secret services with sequential numbers, with the first six digits identical in both documents (Day 20, p122).
Given that the two secret agents had been using these fake passports for some time, had supplied their current mobile phone numbers on their visa applications, and had also done so when booking their favourite hotel in London for their assassination mission via booking.com, this lack of operational security on their part may not seem surprising.
However, their behaviour during their interview with Simonyan on RT added a bizarre new dimension to their apparently sloppy performance.
Why the two Russian secret agents would appear on Russian television at all is an open question — still less six months after they had failed to carry out an assassination with an exotic nerve agent like novichok, using an imprecise method such as smearing it on a door handle. Secret agents, almost by definition, are not expected to go on television to explain what they were doing while they were supposedly on a clandestine mission in a different country, no matter how many CCTV cameras they may have been recorded by in the process, and no matter how unsuccessful their mission.
One would not expect British secret agents to go on the BBC, for example. One would certainly not expect Mark Urban to interview Sergei Skripal’s MI6 handler— Urban’s one-time brother in arms in the Royal Tank Regiment, Pablo Miller— on BBC Newsnight about how Skripal was recruited, and ask him if Skripal had had any recent contact with Miller’s business associate Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent and author of the so-called Steele Dossier that collated apparently false, compromising material from Russia about US President Donald Trump when he was first running for election in 2016.
These are connections that the UK government sought to prevent from being reported at the time, although The Telegraph did report on them just three days after Skripal’s alleged poisoning, the same day that the UK government issued a demand to newspaper editors that such information should be suppressed.
So why did the two Russian secret agents go on television? Perhaps they were ordered to make their appearance on RT by their superiors — but if so, they did not think to ask Margarita Simonyan what kind of questions they would be asked before the interview took place, or take the time to first agree between themselves a credible cover story as to why they were in Salisbury if not to kill Skripal.
Their visible discomfort during the interview and their unconvincing answers to Simonyan’s questions confirmed their guilt in the minds of many Western observers and became a meme or recurring joke on social media, reinforcing the narrative presented by mainstream outlets such as The Guardian that the two Russian secret agents — and by extension, the whole of Russia’s secret services — were incompetent and stupid.
Giovannetti, however — the barrister for the police — told the inquiry that their responses had been “synchronised” in advance.
“We say that the lies were clearly synchronised between the pair in advance and that they came thick and fast on a whole range of material issues,” she told Lord Hughes in her closing statement on the inquiry’s final public day (Day 24, p95). “We say those lies were deliberate and intended to conceal their guilt. There is no other plausible explanation.”
Whatever Giovannetti may claim is plausible, the answers that the two secret agents gave to Simonyan’s questions during their television interview did very little to persuade the average viewer that they were not hiding something — whether it was guilt, petty criminality or even, as Simonyan suggested, their sexuality.
Even the Russians who watched their performance on RT said their responses were “ridiculous” and unconvincing.
Struggling to explain why they were in Salisbury, the secret agents claimed to be innocent tourists attracted by Salisbury Cathedral, its spire, and the fact that the cathedral holds the world’s oldest working clock.
“What were you doing in the UK?” Simonyan asks the two secret agents.
“There’s a famous cathedral there, the Salisbury Cathedral,” one of them replies. “It’s famous not just in all of Europe, it’s famous all over the world I think. It’s famous for its 123 metre spire, it’s famous for its clock, the first clock made in the world that still runs.”
“Why are you always pictured together?” Simonyan asks.
“Let’s not get into our personal lives,” the secret agent replies. “We came here to you for protection, but it’s turning into some kind of interrogation, and we’re starting to get really deep into things… it’s normal for a tourist to come and stay in a two-person room… to save money, it’s just life, to live together is more fun and simpler, it’s normal.”
It should be noted here that according to one report, the two secret agents noisily entertained a prostitute — “definitely a woman” — in their room at the City Stay hotel on the evening before their failed assassination mission. There is no suggestion that the police made any attempt to verify this report, trace the prostitute to interview her, or check on her health in view of the fact that novichok was supposedly found in the room.
Although the secret agents claimed that they had taken photographs at Salisbury Cathedral and would produce them for Simonyan after their interview to prove that they had been there, this apparently did not happen. Neither was there any effort reported on the part of the UK authorities to search the CCTV from the cathedral to verify their claims that they had gone inside.
It has been suggested that through their appearance on RT the Russian secret agents were “trolling” or mocking the UK’s claims that they were on an assassination mission, employing a technique called maskirovka or military deception. But as Simonyan reported and as we have seen, the impression they actually gave throughout their interview was one of deep discomfort — and their answers to her questions bordered on the comical, as if they had quickly Googled the attractions of Salisbury Cathedral minutes before.
If their actions were calculated to confuse, then they were seriously misjudged.
Had the two secret agents wanted to “troll” the UK establishment with their claims to have visited the Salisbury Cathedral, they could have done so far more effectively if they had spent a few minutes more researching it online before their appearance on RT. They would have then discovered that not only does the cathedral have a 123 metre spire and the oldest clock in the world “that still runs”, but that it also holds the best-preserved manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1215, of which only four original examples survive.
The reader will not be troubled by a lengthy discussion about the importance of this ancient document at this point, but it could be described as the foundation of the legal system as we understand it and four of its clauses remain in English law today.
Chief among these is the 39th clause, known as Habeas Corpus, which protects individuals from unlawful detention through the specification that “no free man shall be seized or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land”.
This applies directly to the case of Yulia Skripal, as the most perceptive of the journalists observing the Salisbury events pointed out almost immediately while she was still in hospital, apparently held under sedation as a matter of medical necessity that we now know to be in doubt.
Six months after these events the two Russian secret agents could have informed Margarita Simonyan during their appearance on RT that they had visited Salisbury Cathedral because they were amateur students of the law, appreciated the historical significance of the Magna Carta as the most ancient legal protection of individual liberty in the world, and pointed out that Yulia continues to be denied a challenge to what could be seen as her unlawful detention through a Habeas Corpus petition.
Now that would have been “trolling”.
In all seriousness, Habeas Corpus has broader and very significant implications for the Dawn Sturgess inquiry.
As well as being an ancient legal protection for the individual against unlawful or arbitrary imprisonment, it is closely related to cornerstones of justice such as the right to a trial by jury, due process, transparency of evidence and the presumption of innocence that modern societies are supposed to regard as foundational and sacrosanct.
None of these principles were observed during the Dawn Sturgess inquiry, which operated to a far lower legal standard than that of a courtroom, as Lord Hughes and barristers such as Giovannetti, Mansfield, O’Connor and Straw would have been perfectly well aware.
As an example of this, the presumption of innocence as it applies to trial by jury in UK law requires that juries — with certain very limited exceptions — are not allowed to know of any previous convictions the accused party may have while the trial is held. This is because the suggestion of “bad character”, including previous convictions, is not generally considered to have probative value and is likely to prejudice the jury, which is supposed to consider the evidence of the case on its merits alone.
The Dawn Sturgess inquiry, of course, was not a trial by jury — but it is notable for the fact that it took the opposite approach to the presumption of innocence as a legal principle in evaluating the evidence and testimony it heard. The attitude of the UK establishment to Russian state culpability for the apparent attempt on Sergei Skripal’s life was that responsibility could be at least partly demonstrated through alleged precedent — particularly the Litvinenko case of 2006 — and this was repeatedly stated by UK government officials from the start, long before the inquiry was set up.
When the inquiry finally began, this continued to be a theme. Cmdr Murphy and the foreign office official Jonathan Allen, for example, both referred to the Litvinenko case in their testimony, as if the supposedly established example of an assassination previously ordered by the Russian state was evidence that The Kremlin was behind the alleged attempt to assassinate Skripal in Salisbury more than 11 years later.
We will not digress on the subject of the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko here except to note that, like the death of Dawn Sturgess, it was also subject to a public inquiry — an inquiry that did not publish its report until 2016, 10 years after his death and just two years before the Salisbury incident. The retired judge Sir Robert Owen concluded that Litvinenko’s murder was “probably” approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In short, by the time the Dawn Sturgess inquiry began hearing testimony almost six-and-a-half years after Dawn died, the presumption of guilt had been firmly established through allegations of “bad character” against the Russian state and, in particular, President Putin himself. There was no chance that the testimony presented to the inquiry could be evaluated purely on its merits or probative value, and this was never the intention.
Similarly, due process and transparency of evidence cannot be established where, for whatever reason, part of the judicial or legal proceedings are held in secret. The credibility of the judgement or conclusions that the process arrives at rests then entirely on the authority of the individuals and institutions involved and the respect they may or may not command.
This is analogous to the credibility of scientific evidence that cannot be verified or reproduced, such as the evidence the anonymous DSTL Porton Down expert ‘MK26’ presented that novichok was supposedly found at the City Stay hotel, or the evidence that the novichok supposedly found at Rowley’s Amesbury flat came from the same batch as that allegedly applied to Skripal’s front door handle four months before. From a purely scientific perspective, it has none.
My last words in this article will be to predict the judgement that Lord Hughes comes to when his report is finally published.
As we have seen, a great deal of the evidence and testimony he was presented with during the inquiry was of an ambivalent nature, somehow existing in two realities at the same time according to how it is perceived.
Sergei Skripal was worried about his safety but took very few precautions.
Novichok found in the City Stay hotel room was there but it disappeared.
Yulia was an important witness but her blink interview was unreliable.
Rowley was an unreliable witness but his account was beyond doubt.
Dawn took drugs but it was impossible to know in what quantity.
Antidotes to novichok don’t exist but can be given by accident.
Novichok is deadly but you can wipe it on your jeans and live.
Cats can survive novichok poisoning so they must be killed.
But I do not think the conclusion Lord Hughes will come to is in doubt. I would be delighted if my expectations are confounded, and I am making these predictions in the hope that they are.
However, it seems probable to me that Lord Hughes will judge that the Russian state — and “probably” President Putin himself — was responsible for Dawn’s death, and that she was killed by novichok in Salisbury discarded by the two Russian secret agents, whether or not it came from a bottle that they actually used to contaminate Sergei Skripal’s door.
To borrow a phrase that we have heard repeatedly with reference to the Salisbury and Amesbury incidents, it also seems to me “highly likely” that Lord Hughes will conclude that precautions should have been taken to protect the people of Salisbury and the surrounding area — specifically, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley — from the danger a retired Russian spy like Sergei Skripal living in their midst presented to them.
Rowley and the Sturgess family will then probably use Lord Hughes’s verdict to seek financial compensation for damages through the civil courts, where the indeterminate nature of the novichok narrative and how it supposedly appeared in Salisbury will not be called into question.
And yet questions must be asked.
The contradictions in the novichok narrative show how a death in Wiltshire exposes the shaky foundations of a fundamental restructuring of relations between Russia and the West — a situation that continues to destabilise the world and threaten the collective security of humanity with the dark clouds of war.
If a true understanding of Dawn’s death can bring us back from escalating conflict, then she cannot be said to have died in vain.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank John Helmer, of Dances With Bears, for his consistent focus on the Salisbury novichok case and his incisive reporting on it over the years, much of which informed this article. I would also like to thank Kit Klarenberg for his encouragement. My thanks to all those who have interacted with me on Twitter/X and brought details relating to this case to my attention; they are too many to mention but will know who they are. Finally my thanks to Dr Piers Robinson, and the other editors at Propaganda In Focus.
(Featured Image: “Effigy of John, Lord Cheney who served as a bodyguard to Kings Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII, and rescued the Lancastrian banner even after being unhorsed at the battle of Bosworth” by Mary Harrsch is licensed under CC 2.0)
