By John Helmer, Website, 11/16/24

Yulia Skripal communicated from her bedside at Salisbury District Hospital on March 8, 2018, four days after she and her father Sergei Skripal collapsed from a poison attack, that the attacker used a spray; and that the attack took place when she and her father were eating at a restaurant just minutes before their collapse on a bench outside.

The implication of the Skripal evidence, revealed for the first time on Thursday, is that the attack on the Skripals was not perpetrated by Russian military agents who were photographed elsewhere in Salisbury town at the time; that the attacker or attackers were British agents; and that if their weapon was a nerve agent called Novichok, it came, not from Moscow, but from the UK Ministry of Defence chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.

Porton Down’s subsequent evidence [3] of Novichok contamination in blood samples, clothing, car, and home of the Skripals may therefore be interpreted as British in source, not Russian. 

This evidence was revealed by a police witness testifying at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London on November 14. The police officer, retired Detective Inspector Keith Asman was in 2018, and he remains today the chief of forensics for the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTPSE) group which combines the Metropolitan and regional police forces with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5).

According to Asman’s new disclosure, Yulia Skripal had woken from a coma and confirmed to the doctor at her bedside that she remembered the circumstances of the attack on March 4. What she remembered, she signalled, was not (repeat not) the official British Government narrative that Russian agents had tried to kill them by poisoning the front door-handle of the family home.

The new evidence was immediately dismissed by the Sturgess Inquiry lawyer assisting Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), the judge directing the Inquiry. “We see there,” the lawyer put to Asman as a leading question, “the suggestion, which we now know not to be right, of course”.  — page 72. [4]

Hughes then interrupted to tell the witness to disregard what Skripal had communicated. “If the record that you were given there is right, someone suggested to her ‘Had you been sprayed’. She didn’t come up with it herself.”   — page 73 [4]. Hughes continued to direct the forensics chief to disregard the hearsay of Skripal. “Anyway the suggestion that she had been sprayed in the restaurant didn’t fit with your investigations? A. [Asman] No, sir. LORD HUGHES: Thank you.”

So far in in the Inquiry which began public sessions on October 14, this is the first direct sign of suppression of evidence by Hughes.

Hearsay, he indicates, should be disregarded if it comes from the target of attack, Yulia Skripal. However, hearsay from British Government officials, policemen, and chemical warfare agents at Porton Down must be accepted instead. Hughes has also banned Yulia and Sergei Skripal from testifying at the Inquiry [5]. 

The lawyer appointed and paid by the Government to represent the Skripals in the inquiry hearings said nothing to acknowledge the new disclosure nor to challenge Hughes’s efforts to suppress it.

Asman described his career and credentials in his witness statement to the Inquiry, dated October 23, 2024. His rank when he retired from the regular police forces in 2009 was detective inspector. He was then promoted to higher ranking posts at the operations coordinating group known as Counter Terrorism Policing for the Southeast Region (CTPSE). By 2018 Asman says [6] he was “head of the National Counter Terrorism Forensics Working Group since 2012, and was the UK Counter Terrorism Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) forensic lead.”  In June 2015 Asman was awarded the Order of the British Empire (MBE) “for services to Policing.”  

At page 19 of his recent witness statement, this is what Asman has recorded for the evening of March 8, 2018:

Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ006140_strong-compression.pdf [8] — page 19.

Asman’s went on to claim in this statement: “At this point Yulia Skripal was described as being emotional and fell unconscious. I made notes of my conversation with DI [Detective Inspector] VN104 in one of my notebooks, and in addition this information was confirmed to me in writing the next morning. The information she provided about being sprayed at the restaurant [Zizzi] was seemingly inconsistent with the presence of novichok at the Mill public house and 47 Christie Miller Road. On hearing this, I personally wondered whether Yulia Skripal knew more about it than she had alluded to and therefore whilst being fully cognisant of the SIO’s [Senior Investigative Officer] hypothesis and the need to be open-minded continued to prioritise her property.”

THE SCENE OF THE NOVICHOK CRIME

The Skripals reportedly spent 45 minutes at lunch in Zizzi’s restaurant. Witnesses described Sergei Skripal as upset when he left with Yulia to walk to the bench. Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ [10]

THE EVIDENCE THE CRIME WAS BRITISH

Left: Yulia Skripal in May 2018, the scar of forced intubation still visible; read more here [12].  Centre; Dr Stephen Cockroft who recorded the exchange with Skripal at her bedside on March 8, 2018; that was followed, Cockroft has also testified, by forced sedation and tracheostomy – read more [13]. Right: read the only book on the case evidence. [14] 

Open-minded was not what the judge and his lawyers wanted from Asman when he appeared in public for the first time on Thursday, November 14. Referring precisely to the excerpt of Skripal’s hospital evidence, Francesca Whitelaw KC for the Inquiry asked Asman: “ We can take that [witness statement excerpt] down, but this information as well, 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? A. [Asman] It, I would say, was inconsistent on the basis that she said she was sprayed in the restaurant.”  — page 73. [4]

Asman was then asked by Whitelaw to comment on Yulia Skripal’s exchange with Cockroft. “My question for you is: how, if at all, this impacted on your investigations? A. It only very slightly impacted on it…It was information to have but not necessarily going to change my approach on anything.”  — page 73 [4].

Left, Francesca Whitelaw KC, counsel assisting Hughes, asked Asman about Yulia Skripal’s hospital evidence – click to watch from Minute 2:01:27. Right: Hughes interrupting the witness to dismiss Skripal’s evidence from Min 2:03:23 [16].   On Hughes’s order, Asman’s face was not transmitted during his testimony, and the audio record was delayed by ten minutes before broadcast.

In the Inquiry record [17] of hearings and exhibits since the commencement of the open sessions on October 14, there have been eleven separate exhibits of documents purporting to record what Yulia and Sergei Skripal have said; they include interviews with police and witness statements for the Inquiry; they are dated from April 2018 through October 2024. Most of them have been heavily redacted. None of them is signed by either Skripal.   

Neither Yulia nor Sergei Skripal has been asked by the police, by the Inquiry lawyers, or by Hughes to confirm or deny whether Yulia’s recollection of March 8, 2018, of the spray attack in Zizzi’s Restaurant is still their evidence of what happened to them.

***

BRITISH OPERATION KISS – “KILL INSTANTLY SKRIPALS” – HAS FAILED TO KILL BUT SUCCEEDED AT COVERING UP, ALMOST

By John Helmer, Website, 11/22/24

This is the comic book version of what really happened, as revealed by the clumsiest judge in England – Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right).

Even if all the evidence presented to Hughes and already endorsed by him is true – on the record of six and half years of British Government investigations and twenty-one days of hearings with concealed witness faces, censored documents, missing CCTV — there remains no direct evidence that the Russians attacked the Skripals by poisoning their front-door handle when they were inside their home, four hours before their collapse.

Instead, Hughes and his lawyers have directed the police and other witnesses to stretch their circumstantial evidence and dictated their inferences of Russian guilt. In New York, the legal textbook difference between direct and circumstantial evidence is this [3]. 

To stretch the circumstantial evidence and inferences beyond the criminal standard of reasonable doubt, Hughes has prevented direct evidence from being presented, stopping the Skripals from testifying themselves. Their Home Office lawyer purportedly representing the Skripals in the hearings has said nothing at all; Hughes’s lawyers have manipulated witnesses with leading questions; alternative explanations for the circumstantial evidence have been blocked by Hughes from the hospital doctors and independent experts. The way in which this has been done is comic book jurisprudence. The judges of the former British empire aren’t laughing; this is how they say the means and opportunity of a capital crime must be prosecuted, then judged [4]. 

The CCTV and other evidence presented at the Hughes hearings shows the Russians knew they had been marked by MI6 from the minute they booked their flights and landed at Gatwick Airport; and they then encouraged the video recording which took place, often mugging in front of the CCTV cameras for that purpose. There is no evidence of their coming close enough to the Skripal house, or to Sergei and Yulia Skripal (lead image, left) in person, in order to attack them.

Ergo, the evidence of the murder act is missing; the evidence of the murder weapon is missing; the evidence of the murder attempt at the bench is missing. Means, opportunity, motive are all missing from the British prosecution of the Russians for the crime.

Yulia Skripal has testified that the poison attack took place when she and her father were sprayed as they were eating lunch inside Zizzi’s Restaurant. They then walked outside, felt ill, sat down on a city bench, and collapsed.

Yulia Skripal’s evidence indicates the attackers were British.

The refusal of the British chemical warfare laboratory to name the weapon by its organophosphate name, and reveal its molecular composition and mass conceals the origin of the weapon. In police, forensic or courtroom practice, this is the equivalent of concealing ballistic evidence determining whether a fatal bullet was fired from the gun in the alleged shooter’s hand. 

The evidence, collected by the police and Porton Down agents, then analysed by Porton Down, then announced publicly by then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson days before he told Prime Minister May’s meeting of Cabinet, is as likely to be of a British-made organophosphate nerve agent subsequently called Novichok as of a Russian-made nerve agent.

What motive: why would the British attack the Skripals?

Their reason was that they believed Sergei Skripal was planning to return home to Russia, and that the GRU was planning an exfiltration operation on March 4, 2018. The Russians knew that MI6 would be suspicious, so they prepared decoys. These are the two men, Alexander Petrov (Alexander Mishkin) and Ruslan Boshirov (Anatoly Chepiga), now accused of the Novichok attack.

The British planned to kill the Skripals but camouflage the operation, as they have done. Motive was pressing for the British if Sergei Skripal had returned to Russia, revealing himself in Moscow to be one of the first successful triple agents in modern espionage history.

The Russian exfiltration failed; the British failed to execute the Skripals on the spot; for a few minutes from her hospital bed on March 8, Yulia Skripal revealed what had happened before she was put into an artificial coma, then silenced with a tracheostomy on March 21, and kept incommunicado ever since.

The British camouflage for their operation – Operation KISS, “Kill Instantly the Skripals” — relied on the door-handle as “ground zero” – the original source of the Novichok – and on Porton Down to replace the inconclusive or negative tests conducted by doctors treating the Skripals at Salisbury District Hospital.

A corpse had to be found, dead enough not to be able to testify otherwise as Yulia Skripal had done.

That turned out to be Dawn Sturgess, who died at her home on June 30, 2018, of cardiac arrest and brain hypoxia after consuming a combination of sleeping and anti-anxiety medications, cocaine, and fentanyl. The Novichok weapon, fabricated in a perfume atomiser by MI6 and Porton Down, was then placed on Sturgess’s kitchen table for the police to discover eleven days after her drug binge and collapse; and after medics and police had failed to find it through multiple and repeated searches.

For the evidence and the law, and to understand who laughs last in this comic book of British public inquiry, follow frame by frame, tweet by tweet, here [5].