By Paul Sutton, Free Press Backlash, 10/17/24

The much belated public inquiry into Dawn Sturgess’ supposed death from Novichok poisoning is now in progress. It’s claimed she was randomly and inadvertently killed in the Skripal affair. I’d anyway have been interested but I’m in truth fascinated, as I was brought up in Salisbury and my father was director of the nearby Public Health Laboratory Service lab at Porton Down.

This is the Wikipedia account of how Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were supposedly attacked by Russian assassins:

“On Sunday 4th March 2018, Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, who was visiting from Moscow, were found “slipping in and out of consciousness on a public bench “near a shopping centre in Salisbury by a doctor and nurse who were passing by. While at Salisbury District Hospital, they were put into induced comas to prevent organ damage.

“Following the incident, health authorities checked 21 members of the emergency services and the public for symptoms. Two police officers were treated for possible minor symptoms, said to be itchy eyes and wheezing, while a third, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who had been sent to Sergei Skripal’s house, was in a serious condition. By 22nd March 2018, Detective Sergeant Bailey had recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital, and by 15 January 2019, he returned to active duty.

“The police declared a major incident as a number of agencies were involved. On 6th March, it was agreed under the National Counter Terrorism Policing Network that the Counter Terrorism Command based within the Metropolitan Police would take over the investigation from Wiltshire Police. Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, appealed for witnesses to the incident following a COBR meeting chaired by Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

“On 12th March 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May identified the nerve agent used in the attack as a Russian-developed nerve agent Novichok and demanded explanation from the Russian government. Two days later, May said that Russia was responsible for the incident and announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation.

“On 30th June 2018, two British Nationals were hospitalized by chemical poisoning in Amesbury, 8 miles (13 km) from Salisbury where Skripal had been attacked. One victim died in the hospital. Police determined they were poisoned by the same Novichok nerve agent used to attempt to assassinate Sergei and his daughter, and Home Secretary Sajid Javid told the House of Commons that the victims had likely been poisoned by the improperly discarded nerve agent used to attack Sergei.

“On 7th June 2020, The Sunday Times reported that Sergei and his daughter had been settled in New Zealand under new identities. A few weeks later, the New Zealand Herald raised several doubts about the report.”

The story is so absurd as to seem an elaborate joke, designed for some other purpose. The Russian agents supposedly responsible stayed in a grotty east London hotel (where they used hookers and bought drugs) then travelled down to Salisbury on Saturday 3rd March, to survey the scene. A light fall of snow sent them scurrying back to east London, Russians being unused to snow. Obviously they’d stayed in east London to ensure a lengthy and inconvenient repeat trip to Salisbury, with plenty of CCTV to spot them on the way.

Mindful of this, they returned on Sunday 4th and smeared nerve agent on Sergei’s front door handle, then sauntered into Salisbury down the Wilton Road and Fisherton Street, looking in shop windows and ensuring they’d again be spotted. They walked past the station and a London train, to spend time strolling around the city as tourists. Having spare Novichok in a perfume bottle (now miraculously sealed and in a box that was also cellophane wrapped) they dumped it in a charity shop collection bin. Weeks later, it was picked up by junkie Charlie Rowley and given to his unlucky girlfriend Dawn Sturgess as a present. She used it as a spray and tragically died after being hospitalised.

What a crock. I’m not denying the truth somehow involves the Russians ‘tourists’, but wielding Novichok? When the Skripals were taken to Odstock, the initial notes had fentanyl poisoning on them. Interestingly, Skripal senior’s arrival in Salisbury seems to have coincided with a spike in local fentanyl deaths.

I think the Novichok on the door handle theory is too absurd to need much discussion. If this was the intended assassination method, why? The arguments given are that Putin’s regime weren’t worried about killing thousands. Whilst Russia is clearly a rogue state they presumably don’t do things which make no sense. With the 2018 World Cup weeks away, would they really launch an indiscriminate nerve-agent attack rather than just shooting or stabbing the chap?

No sample taken from a patient was ever identified specifically as Novichok. The Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) at Porton could only state that the substance was ‘of a type developed by Russia’. Samples provided to a Swiss lab by Porton were stated to have ‘almost a complete absence of impurities’. This was used as evidence that the Novichok was military grade and could only have been produced by a state. But it also signalled that the sample was fresh and couldn’t have been on someone’s door handle for days. Maybe it came from Porton’s own material. They must have had some, to identify the supposed sample as Russian in the first place.

No satisfactory answer has been given on how the Skripals were poisoned by their door handle but then fit enough to go to a pub, feed bread to some ducks (none of which were affected) eat a big lunch in Zizzi’s, then both be stricken and disabled at the same moment. They were different ages, genders and weights so that the dose needed wouldn’t be identical. In any case, the agent should have killed them after contact in less than a minute. As it was, the first person to discover the Skripals sitting on a bench was most fortunately the Chief Nurse of the British Army, Colonel A L McCourt, who was ‘just walking past’.

As for the less fortunate Amesbury junkies, Charlie Rowley’s home was urgently searched for Novichok. None was found until 11 days later, when police looked again and allegedly found it in a perfume bottle, sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile, there was at least a four month delay in the police searching the crummy east London City Stay hotel; four months in which a cleaner might have fatally stumbled across more Novichok or a guest could have been contaminated. But maybe not, if the stuff was never there.

The BBC’s ‘Diplomatic Editor’ Mark Urban is a regular conduit for the security services. He fronted much of the BBC’s original coverage of the Skripal story. Yet he concealed from the viewers how he’d been in contact with Sergei Skripal for months before the alleged poisoning and had several meetings with him. Urban and Pablo Miller (Sergei’s British MI5 handler) were previously officers together in the Royal Tank Regiment.

Most likely, Rowley and Sturgess were used as a convenient couple of low-level addicts. She suffered a drug death and the security services piggy-backed their bizarre Novichok story onto them, to bolster public opinion which wasn’t buying the Skripal story. Rowley’s account changed but he supposedly settled on finding the perfume on rooting through the charity-shop collection bin. That it was still there more than a month after the Skripal event isn’t credible, since it was emptied regularly. How Rowley didn’t die, or how Sturgess didn’t die immediately, after both touching even a minute quantity is also not believable.

My approach is to focus on the most inexplicable part of the story. And that surely is the Russians travelling to Salisbury on successive days from an inconvenient location, to carry out an assassination. Why would they need any reconnaissance at all, for the door smearing?

But they weren’t there to kill him. The logical explanation is that they went back to London because they’d been told to. I think they’d met Sergei on Saturday but he’d sent them away, so they went back to London for discussion with their bosses about their next move. They’d no worries about CCTV; why would they attract attention? The mission was to get Sergei to work for the Russians again – possibly defect – and probably he already knew them. Perhaps they’d been working on this through his daughter, maybe coercion and threats to her were involved.

The Russians then returned on the Sunday and he agreed to meet them in a Salisbury pub, probably the Bishops Mill, very close to Zizzi’s (where he’d made a prior lunch reservation). This would explain why they wandered around unconcerned, supposedly after smearing his door; they’d done no such thing. Sergei was happier meeting them in a busy pub – was he worried about his British handlers seeing them visit his home or of the Russians getting violent?

Anyway, we’d got wind of the Skripals’ position and we sprayed them on the bench with some opiate, then got the pair up to Odstock. Our spooks were delighted to leave the two Russian agents thwarted, with no choice but returning empty handed and humiliated to Russia. Possibly our motivation was as much about punishing the Skripals as worrying about their defection, since spraying them on the bench would surely not have been our last chance to prevent it.

Or maybe – to be even more George Smiley – we’d always known about the Russian plan because we engineered it, setting a trap. Presumably without Skripal’s awareness but it could also work with him loyal to us and the pair never at any real risk from the spraying. But that’s a big stretch, since they seem to have been genuinely stricken.

Perhaps there were witnesses to them sitting on the bench, despite the prompt attentions of the Army nurse who’d been hovering. Hence the Novichok story from us. Or maybe that was always the intention; our whole purpose was that story, to humiliate Moscow. The policeman Nick Bailey, supposedly poisoned via the Skripal’s door, could have been Special Branch so that was also fake. Crucially, the absurdity of the ‘Novichock attack’ and the resulting world-wide condemnation would enrage the Russians and further isolate them internationally. Realistically, what could they do: admit they’d been trying to get Skripal back and had spectacularly failed?

This explains the half-arsed and embarrassed performance later of the two agents on Russian TV, posing without conviction as innocent tourists who’d visited England just to see Salisbury cathedral then been thwarted on their first visit by a snow shower. Maybe both sides rather enjoyed the stupidity of this story and played along, but the Russians had little choice.

As said, Dawn Sturgess’ was a druggy death – maybe fentanyl – accidental and unrelated to the Skripals, unless they were coincidentally also her suppliers. Whatever, it was used by our side to add veracity and generate public outrage. The nonsense story about the perfume bottle was fed to her boyfriend, who was reliably unreliable but looked after. The more confused he was the better.

And the Skripals? Possibly dead, since the excuse for not even seeing a video recording of them is flimsy. All the Salisbury inquest get are his supposed words, read from a paper copy. How on earth would their safety be compromised by a recording played but not put online? Then again, maybe the Russians do want them dead now, if all along they were working for us and playing them. It all depends on whether they were pawns or players.

I think if my explanation is true then we don’t come out of it too badly, but Salisbury has been treated appallingly. There never was any risk to public health and the publicity was terrible for tourism. Cynically, one could say that in the longer term it’s helped publicise the city.

My last visit was in 2022, for my mother’s funeral. In fact, we ate in Zizzi’s where the Skripals scoffed a hearty meal whilst supposedly poisoned by Novichok. I tried to chat about this with a waitress, who quickly summoned her manager. He was friendly and warned me not to talk about it publicly, but implied they’d not suffered any harm as a business.