Putin ordered novichok ttack on me, says ex-spy

Sergei Skripal gives evidence over death of Dawn Sturgess

- ANDY GREGORY

Salisbury poisoning victim Sergei Skripal believes Vladimir Putin personally ordered the novichok attack on him and his daughter Yulia, the former spy told the inquiry into Dawn Sturgess’s death yesterday.

In a new witness statement made public at the hearing in Salisbury, Mr Skripal said he believed the Russian president “must have at least given permission for the attack on Yulia and me” in March 2018.

Mr Skripal, a former Russian GRU military intelligence agent convicted in Russia in 2004 on charges of spying for Britain before being freed in a prisoner swap in 2010 and moving to the UK, said: “Any GRU commander taking a decision like this without Putin’s permission would have been severely punished.”

The inquiry, which is being heard in Salisbury this week before moving to London on 28 October, will seek to establish whether Sturgess, aged 44, died after she was caught in the “crossfire of an illegal and outrageous international assassination attempt”, lead counsel Andrew O’Connor KC said.

Ms Sturgess was killed after coming into contact with the Russian-engineered nerve agent in Amesbury in July 2018, four months after the attempted murder of the Skripals in Salisbury. Police officer Nick Bailey also fell ill after becoming exposed to the chemical.

They were poisoned when Russian spies are alleged to have smeared the nerve agent on Mr Skripal’s door handle. Mr Bailey and the Skripals survived, as did Ms Sturgess’s boyfriend Charlie Rowley, who had unwittingly given her a perfume bottle thought to contain the killer chemical weapon.

Sturgess, Mr Rowley and the Skripals each suffered the same symptoms of convulsions and “pinpoint pupils” shortly after coming into contact with the poison, the inquiry heard yesterday.