Schrödinger’s novichok: 12 points from the Dawn Sturgess inquiry, part 3
By Tim Norman | Propaganda In Focus | March 3, 2025
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.
Tim Norman lives on the south coast of England and began his career in technology journalism in the 1990s writing about the then-emerging internet. He has worked in editorial production roles for local, national and international media and on daily, weekly and monthly publications. A member of the NUJ, he was Father of the Chapel at The Argus in Brighton when the newspaper went on strike in 2011.
12,000 Brits arrested per year over social media posts – Times
RT | April 7, 2025
Thousands of people in the UK have been detained and questioned by police over online posts deemed threatening or offensive, The Times has reported, citing custody data.
According to figures published on Friday, officers make around 12,000 arrests annually under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. These laws criminalize causing distress by sending messages that are “grossly offensive,” or by sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character” via electronic communications networks.
In 2023 alone, officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests – around 33 per day. The Times said this marks a 58% increase from 2019, when 7,734 arrests were recorded.
At the same time, government data shows that convictions and sentencings have dropped by nearly a half. While some cases were resolved through out-of-court settlements, the most commonly cited reason was “evidential difficulties,” particularly when victims declined to proceed.
The statistics have sparked public outcry, with civil liberties groups accusing the authorities of overpolicing the internet and undermining free speech through the use of “vague” communications laws.
The Times highlighted the case of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, who were arrested on January 29 after raising concerns in a private parents’ WhatsApp group about the hiring process of their daughter’s school. Six uniformed officers arrived at their home, detained them in front of their youngest child, and took them to a police station.
The couple was questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications, and causing a nuisance on school property after the school alleged they had “cast aspersions” about the chair of governors. They were fingerprinted, searched, and locked in a cell for eight hours.
“It was hard to shake off the sense that I was living in a police state,” Allen told the Daily Mail, adding that the messages contained “no offensive language or threat” but were simply a “bit sarcastic.”
UK lawyers to charge 10 Britons for Gaza war crimes
The Cradle | April 7, 2025
A leading UK human rights lawyer is set to submit a war crimes complaint to the Metropolitan police against 10 British citizens who served with the Israeli army in Gaza.
Michael Mansfield KC will hand the 240-page complaint to the police department’s war crimes unit on 7 April. It cites Israel’s targeted killing of civilians and humanitarian aid workers, as well as airstrikes on hospitals and densely populated civilian neighborhoods. It also includes the targeting of religious sites and historic monuments.
The documents were prepared by British lawyers and researchers from The Hague. The names of the 10 Britons in question have not been made public.
“If one of our nationals is committing an offence, we ought to be doing something about it. Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly,” Mansfield said.
“British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law,” he added.
The dossier is based on open-source evidence and testimonies from eyewitnesses. The crimes include an Israeli army bulldozer trampling a dead body in the courtyard of one of the several hospitals attacked by Israeli ground forces in Gaza.
“The public will be shocked, I would have thought, to hear that there’s credible evidence that Brits have been directly involved in committing some of those atrocities,” said Sean Summerfield, British barrister at Doughty Street Chambers – who helped put together the evidence which is to be submitted.
The complaint comes as Israeli soldiers are being increasingly pursued in international courts for their roles in the crimes committed against Palestinians in Gaza.
Pro-Palestine organizations have filed dozens of criminal complaints in courts around the world since the start of the year, targeting Israeli soldiers for their role in Tel Aviv’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.
Among these organizations is the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), named after the six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by the Israeli army along with her family in Gaza City last year.
“When genocide or crimes against humanity occur, there is a global need for justice and accountability, not only from victims but also from those in solidarity with them. Like many others, I was deeply impacted by witnessing the level of impunity displayed by the Israelis, who were not only committing these crimes but also recording and posting them on social media, acting as if they were above any legal framework,” HRF Chairman Dyab Abou Janjah told The Cradle’s Esteban Carillo in an exclusive interview in February.
HRF focuses its efforts on pursuing both dual-national Israeli soldiers and those who leave Israel for vacation.
In January, a Brazilian court ordered an investigation into a vacationing Israeli soldier who had been identified in a video of his participation in the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
The soldier fled Brazil with help from the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Israel has warned active-duty soldiers not to travel over the risk of legal action, and has issued certain restrictions on media interviews with military personnel.
G4S Mercs Guarding Zelensky: Private Military Contractor or Undeclared Branch of SAS and MI6?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 07.04.2025
Once touting itself as “the only international security solutions provider in Ukraine,” G4S has deployed up to 1,000 mercenaries to protect the West’s client state. Here’s what to know about them.
Headquartered in London and staffed by over 800K personnel across 85+ countries, G4S is a private security behemoth with a flair for hiring ex-military and intel officers.
A subsidiary of US private security giant Allied Universal since 2021, G4S has been an indispensable contractor for Western military ops, from Afghanistan and Iraq (where they were accused of paying off the Taliban and plundering religious sites in Mosul), to post-Gaddafi Libya, Sudan and Colombia (mercenary recruitment and training) and Israel (“security” at checkpoints, West Bank settlements and prisons).
G4S entered Ukraine in the mid-1990s, providing security consulting and investigative services for private clients, and guards for OSCE and EU missions. An Odessa-registered subsidiary was created in 1995, followed by a Kiev branch registered in Amsterdam in 1996.
G4S’s Ukraine footprint grew dramatically after the 2014 coup, and especially after 2022, with its mercs tasked with:
- “securing” strategic facilities like ports, airports and major enterprises,
- guarding valuable cargoes during shipping,
- collecting intel on Russian military personnel,
- training saboteurs,
- operating private prisons (allegedly),
- and providing “protective services” for top government officials and private VIPs, including the Ukrainian president’s office and Kiev’s city administration.
In 2023, the firm registered new sub-entities in Ukraine: G4S Ordnance Management and G4S Risk Management.
Prominent Russian military observer Alexander Artamonov suspects that G4S is private only in name, and that it and other prominent British PMCs like Prevail Partners are effectively an informal or undeclared branch office of Britain’s SAS and MI6.
The convenience of such PMC arrangements include plausible deniability when things go wrong, and involvement in activity which governments may not want to be openly associated with.
Green Policies, Not Trump Tariffs, Killing British Steel
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear World | April 4, 2025
British Steel, the U.K.’s last bastion of primary steelmaking, announced plans to shutter its two blast furnaces at Scunthorpe, effectively ending 150 years of virgin steel production in Britain. Media outlets have rushed to pin the blame on U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent 25% tariffs on steel imports.
But this narrative is a convenient distraction from a far more insidious culprit: the U.K. government’s relentless pursuit of self-destructive green policies that have crippled British manufacturing for nearly a decade.
During the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s steel industry forged the island’s ascent as a global superpower. Steel was the sinew of progress, enabling the nation to outpace rivals and cement its economic and military supremacy well into the 20th century. Once the backbone of its industrial might, steel manufacturing has been suffocated by exorbitant energy costs and uncompetitive pricing – both direct consequences of a cult’s dogma that prioritizes reducing emissions of harmless carbon dioxide over economic survival.
Having produced over 20 million metric tons annually in the 1970s, output dwindled to a paltry 4 million tons by 2024. Meanwhile, imports have surged to 68% of domestic consumption, up from 55% in 2022, as cheaper foreign steel floods the market. The government’s pledge to “rebuild” the sector rings hollow when its own policies paved the way for this collapse.
British Steel’s owner, Chinese-owned Jingye, cited “highly challenging market conditions, the imposition of tariffs, and higher environmental costs” as reasons for the Scunthorpe closure, which threatens up to 2,700 jobs and could commence as early as June.
This shutdown is not a sudden reaction to external trade pressures but rather the inevitable outcome of a self-inflicted death spiral. While China and India make cheaper, carbon-intensive steel with no apparent “climate guilt,” the U.K.’s obsession with net-zero “virtue” turns its producers into sacrificial offerings at the green altar.
Green Policies: The Silent Assassin
Let’s dispense with the pleasantries: Britain’s green policies are more a national suicide than a noble crusade. For nearly a decade, successive governments have chased emissions targets with a zeal that ignores the realities of industrial survival. The Climate Change Act of 2008 set the stage, committing the U.K. to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050 – a hideous impossibility that was later tightened to the holy grail of the even more stringent “net zero.”
This ambition birthed a web of regulations, taxes, and subsidies that have jacked up energy costs to levels unmatched among Britain’s peers and made steel manufacturing impossible without incurring heavy losses.
One proposed solution was a shift to electric arc furnaces, which recycle scrap steel rather than producing it from raw materials with more carbon-intensive blast furnaces. However British Steel’s Chinese owner reportedly sought a $1.3 billion subsidy to fund the $2.6 billion change.
In addition, the U.K.’s industrial electricity prices are approximately 40% higher than France’s and about four times more than those of the U.S. For energy-guzzling steelmakers, such price differentials – a product of “green” energy choices – are a death sentence.
Adding to the pain of British Steel is the U.K. Emissions Trading Scheme that adds costs to the company’s emissions of carbon dioxide, a penalty largely evaded by Chinese and Indian rivals.
The world’s steel leader, China produces more than 1 billion metric tons annually – exceeding the U.K.’s total output over the past 47 years. India follows closely, churning out the metal at prices Britain can’t match.
The steel industries of China and India are fueled by cheap coal and minimal constraints on carbon dioxide emissions. Neither faces the punitive energy costs or emissions taxes that hobble British Steel. While the U.K. levies up to $103 on each ton of carbon dioxide emitted, China charges its manufacturers but a fraction of that. India has no national charge at all. The result? British Steel, saddled with green compliance costs, is priced out of the global market.
China and India didn’t need to lift a finger as Westminster policymakers chased a utopian vision that delivered industrial ruin. The media can spin its tariff tales, but the truth is plainer: Britain’s steel industry was slowly bled dry by a government too enamored with green dogma to see the carnage it wrought.
The demise of British Steel serves as a stark warning to manufacturing giants in Western Europe and the U.S. Trading cost-effectiveness for climate compliance is a Faustian bargain to be resisted by corporate executives and lobbyists.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
Schrödinger’s novichok: 12 points from the Dawn Sturgess inquiry, part 1
By Tim Norman | Propaganda In Focus | February 18, 2025
What happens when evidence of a nerve agent poisoning exists in impossible dual states? Part one of a three-part report on the Dawn Sturgess inquiry examines elements simultaneously lethal yet harmless, present yet absent, sealed yet used.
A note on sources: Links presented in bold go to precise points in the YouTube feed from the Dawn Sturgess inquiry. Links that are not in bold are to supporting sources: articles and videos from mainstream news providers.
Point 1. The perfume spray that wasn’t a perfume spray
The multi-million pound inquiry into the death of the UK citizen Dawn Sturgess concluded public hearings on 2 December 2024, although further sessions — with only a select few participants — will be held in secret (sessions the Sturgess family’s lawyers will not be allowed to participate in).
A final report from the chair of the inquiry, retired Supreme Court judge Lord Anthony Hughes, is expected to be delivered at some point in 2025.
The inquiry, which was set up to investigate the circumstances leading to Dawn’s death in July 2018 — a death allegedly caused by a “military grade” nerve agent called novichok — would not have been held at all had Dawn’s daughter not mounted a legal challenge against the coroner’s decision to limit the scope of his inquest into the death of her mother.
The coroner ruled that he would not consider Russian state culpability for Dawn’s death, which was seemingly collateral damage caused by two Russian secret agents who had allegedly used novichok in an attempt to assassinate the retired Russian double agent Sergei Skripal four months previously, on 4 March 2018, in the English city of Salisbury.
After Dawn’s daughter won her challenge against the coroner’s decision to limit the scope of his inquest, the UK government converted the inquest into a so-called public inquiry so that evidence could be heard in secret.
The home secretary at the time then acted to ensure that evidence would be hidden from the Sturgess family and from the inquiry itself — without consulting Lord Hughes, the chair of the inquiry, before doing so.
Despite this unprecedented censorship, several weeks of public hearings were eventually held, with the proceedings streamed on YouTube (subject to a 10 minute delay so that any sensitive material could be redacted) during which a number of important facts were revealed about the alleged attack on Sergei Skripal, and the circumstances surrounding Dawn’s death.
There have been a couple of articles in the mainstream media summarising “what we have learnt” from the inquiry since the public hearings ended but, for whatever reason, journalists overlooked many of the important facts that emerged — or failed to give them sufficient attention.
However, at least one fact was clear before the inquiry began: a perfume spray that wasn’t a perfume spray lies at the heart of Dawn Sturgess case.
This is because the Russian secret agents allegedly used a small container disguised as a perfume bottle to apply novichok to the front door handle of Skripal’s home at around 12pm on 4 March 2018, shortly thereafter discarding the bottle in a public bin somewhere in Salisbury. There it was apparently found by Dawn’s boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, who later gave it to her in the morning of 30 June at his flat in the nearby town of Amesbury.
Exactly where and when Rowley found the bottle — if indeed he did find it — is unclear, as he seems to have no memory of doing so. He initially told police he had probably picked it up about four days before giving it to Dawn (Day 22, p117), but a senior police officer told the inquiry he thought Rowley had in fact picked the bottle up shortly after it was discarded, and had then held onto it for nearly four months — including when he moved from Salisbury to Amesbury in May (Day 22, p165) — before giving it to her.
Despite the fact he could not remember where he found the bottle, Rowley had a clear memory of the condition it was in. He said it was boxed and sealed in plastic packaging, as if new. He also said the liquid in the bottle was oily and odourless — something he discovered when he spilled some of the substance on himself after opening the box.
He said he gave the bottle containing the remainder of the liquid to Dawn as a gift believing it was perfume, even though it did not have a fragrance.
The bottle’s long-nosed pump nozzle was apparently designed to squirt its contents directly onto a surface rather than atomise the liquid into an aerosol mist, as would be expected with a genuine perfume spray. The nozzle bears a striking resemblance to the nozzle used on a throat spray called Teva Jox, but it was in fact supposedly highly engineered to protect the Russian secret agents as they applied novichok to Skripal’s door.
Rowley said the pump nozzle was packaged separately from the bottle inside the box, and it was in the act of attaching the pump nozzle to the bottle that he spilled some of the liquid on his hands.
The first point to be made about the events leading to Dawn’s death, and the inquiry into its circumstances, concerns this nozzle and how it worked.
It has become an important part of the narrative of Dawn’s death that she sprayed the liquid in the bottle onto her skin, and this is what killed her. This simple action can be easily envisaged and understood by anyone who has seen or used a spray perfume bottle in their everyday lives.
But this is pure suggestion — at best, a very sloppy shorthand to describe what she apparently did; at worst a deceptive use of language that evokes an easily understood behaviour to disguise problems with the narrative of Dawn’s poisoning that begin at the moment she allegedly poisoned herself.
The reality is an aerosolised mist of “military grade” nerve agent would present an extreme risk of injury or death to anyone attempting to use such a neurotoxin to contaminate any kind of surface, unless they were wearing full protective equipment of the kind that the UK authorities were later seen wearing while investigating the Salisbury and Amesbury events.
For this reason it was reported that the novichok was, in fact, smeared onto Skripal’s front door handle, rather than sprayed onto it. But appealing to the popular understanding of how real perfume bottles work, it was also widely reported that Dawn sprayed the liquid onto her wrists believing it was perfume as it superficially appeared to be, even if it did not smell.
The sloppy and inaccurate — if not deceptive — suggestion that the bottle of nerve agent functioned and was used like a perfume spray was accepted and used by the inquiry, and it was described as such throughout the proceedings, including by Adam Straw KC (a barrister representing the Sturgess family) and Lisa Giovannetti KC (representing the police).
For example, the suggestion that the bottle was a spray was made by Straw in his opening remarks to the inquiry on Day 1 (p87): “Dawn sprayed the substance on herself”, and the same suggestion was repeatedly made by Giovannetti in her closing remarks on Day 24 (p109): “The… applicator … was designed [to] provide some protection to a user spraying the bottle’s contents away from themselves — but sadly of course not to Ms Sturgess who unwittingly used it to spray poison directly onto her skin.”
The inquiry further reinforced the popular understanding that the bottle functioned as a spray by introducing the detail that Dawn had probably also sniffed or breathed in the military grade nerve agent that killed her at the same time as spraying herself with it, meaning that she suffered what an anonymous government toxicologist referred to as ‘FT49’ said would have been “multi-route exposure” (Day 9, p122).
This apparent multi-route exposure was used to explain why she was affected so quickly.
The testimony of ‘FT49’ on this point was supported by other expert witnesses who appeared before the inquiry.
On Day 11 (p62) of the proceedings Professor Guy Rutty, “the UK’s leading academic forensic pathologist” — told Lord Hughes that Dawn had experienced symptoms very rapidly because she had “probably” inhaled aerosolised particles of novichok, as well as applying it to her skin.
“There would also potentially be just some atmospheric liberation of it,” Rutty said. “I think it’s probably highly likely that it was also in essence breathed in nasally or orally.”
This spray that was not a spray is the first example of the theme of this article: the strange contradictions that run through the narrative of the circumstances leading to Dawn’s death, and the oddly indeterminate properties of the “military grade” nerve agent novichok in particular.
The novichok narrative presents a nerve agent that defies its own nature: a substance lethal in microscopic amounts yet casually wiped on jeans; a toxin requiring full protective equipment that restaurant staff encountered without harm; a poison capable of killing thousands that left a cat unharmed for days in a contaminated house.
The quantum state of novichok — simultaneously lethal and yet harmless — sets the pattern for every aspect of this case, including Dawn’s death.
Dawn apparently began to experience symptoms within 15 minutes of spraying novichok on her skin. She was taken to hospital that morning but had suffered catastrophic brain damage. She died nine days later when the decision was made to turn off her life support.
Rowley also sniffed the liquid in the bottle, which is how he knew that it did not have much of an odour, and accidentally poured a significant quantity on his hands. But unlike Dawn he was not affected for hours — a point we will examine in more detail in a moment — and he recovered.
Dawn’s death was the only fatality allegedly caused by the novichok supposedly used by the two Russian secret agents in their apparent attempt to kill Sergei Skripal in Salisbury on 4 March 2018.
Sergei and his daughter Yulia, who was visiting him from Moscow at the time, both allegedly touched the poison that the secret agents had supposedly applied to his front door — and both Sergei and Yulia seemingly received a dose large enough to incapacitate them together on a bench in Salisbury city centre, a few hours after their alleged exposure.
Although they were initially believed by paramedics and doctors to have taken an opiate — initially thought to be the powerful synthetic opiate fentanyl — and treated accordingly, both Sergei and Yulia survived — as did Charlie Rowley when, months later, he “tipped” novichok onto his hands while attaching the pump dispenser to the supposed assassination weapon.
A police officer, Nick Bailey, also apparently became ill after having somehow being exposed to the nerve agent while investigating Skripal’s house in the early hours of Monday morning. He too survived exposure to what was said to be a lethal poison.
To the reader: what follows are 11 more significant points from the Dawn Sturgess inquiry that outlets such as the BBC did not go into in their coverage, still less analyse in context.
As you read through them, observe how the supposed extreme toxicity of the nerve agent becomes flexible or adaptable to the over-arching narrative of a deadly Russian chemical weapon attack on UK soil.
At several points, you will see novichok presented as a toxin of terrifying lethality: a weapon of mass destruction. But at other — often simultaneous — points you will see how it was evidently not lethal to victims, bystanders, first responders or even animals.
The extreme duality or cognitive dissonance around the narrative considered in this article, satirically entitled “Schrödinger’s novichok”, should become clear throughout.
Let us move on to the fate of Skripal’s cat.
Point 2. The poisoned cat that wasn’t poisoned
Sergei Skripal had a pet cat called Nash van Drake as well as two guinea pigs, and after Sergei was taken to hospital following his alleged exposure to novichok a Salisbury veterinarian, who had cared for the animals for years, apparently contacted police with concerns about their welfare.
But it seems this vet’s concerns were not acted on by the police as they examined Sergei’s house, despite claims to the contrary at the inquiry.
“Every time we [the police] were in the premises we were trying to care for the animals but the cat was particularly stressed by our presence,” Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command, told the inquiry on Day 15 (p39) of proceedings.
The police had apparently not initially been aware that the front door was the source of the alleged novichok contamination.
“It is clear that Sergei Skripal’s house was not regarded as crucial to the investigation, or a potential health risk, until several days after the incident,” the BBC reported on 28 March 2018, and a local BBC Wiltshire reporter recalled police “with no or minimal protective clothing going in and out of that front door” two days after it was allegedly contaminated.
Once the police were aware that the door handle was the alleged source of the neurotoxin, however, they became concerned that the house and the cat inside had been contaminated: possibly by their own movements.
The cat had somehow survived inside the house up until this point, although it had reportedly become severely malnourished. The police seemingly, therefore, decided that the cat had to be destroyed for its own good.
“Subsequently we knew the house was contaminated,” Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry (Day 15, p39). “So for wellbeing reasons associated to the cat and its condition and the fact that it was likely to have been contaminated, the cat had to be euthanised for its welfare.”
“Was there in truth any prospect of removing the animals from the house?” Cmdr Murphy is asked by Andrew O’Connor KC, counsel to the inquiry.
“I do not believe there was any prospect of them ever coming out of the house, no,” Murphy replies.
Murphy then says that the guinea pigs “died of natural causes in the house”, although it was reported at the time that they had died of thirst.
The bodies of the animals were incinerated at nearby Porton Down, the UK’s chemical weapons research facility also known as the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). This was done immediately “over fears they may have been contaminated with the deadly novichok nerve agent”.
But just how deadly was it? What would happen, for example, if you wiped some of this substance on your jeans after spilling it on your hands?
Point 3. The toxic trousers that took their time
Like spraying perfume on your wrists and rubbing them together, wiping your hands on your trousers after you have spilled liquid on them is a natural action people can easily envisage, and this is what Charlie Rowley apparently did.
But as we know, what he casually wiped on his jeans was not an ordinary liquid.
The background leading to the point where Charlie Rowley apparently wiped novichok on his jeans needs to be explained for its significance to become clear. This background information about Rowley’s health, lifestyle and witness statements as they were delivered to the Dawn Sturgess inquiry will also give context to some of the other points we will come to.
As we have seen, Rowley was unable to recall where he found the bottle of novichok that allegedly killed Dawn and it is purely a suggestion that he found it in a bin because he was in the habit of “bin diving” — that is, scavenging through public rubbish containers looking for items to sell.
Part of the reason Rowley’s memory is so poor may be the long-term effects of his exposure to novichok. But the inquiry heard that he was also a self-confessed alcoholic and heroin addict who took large amounts of drugs and consumed very large quantities of alcohol almost daily, including on the day before he gave Dawn the bottle that allegedly killed her.
As well as being unsure where he supposedly found the bottle, Rowley was also unable to recall when he found the bottle, again apparently because of his frequently intoxicated state.
Possibly for these reasons, Rowley did not give testimony to the inquiry in person and was not required to answer questions from the lawyers involved — despite the fact that he is the key witness upon whose evidence the investigation into the circumstances of Dawn’s death depends.
His crucial account was presented only through transcripts of police interviews, which were partially read out during the proceedings. The unclear and often conflicting nature of his testimony then became the subject of speculation on the part of the inquiry’s lawyers and participants such as Cmdr Murphy.
On Day 3 (p55) of the inquiry, lead counsel O’Connor drew attention to a passage in an interview transcript where the interviewing officer asks Rowley: “How often would you take heroin?
“Mr Rowley says, ‘regularly’.”
O’Connor continues: “[Rowley] is asked a question on what he means by that, and he says daily.”
On Day 10 (p46), police officer Eirin Martin testified to the inquiry that Rowley was not only a heroin user but also “a well-known drug dealer” in the Salisbury area.
On Day 22 (p70), part of a transcript of a police interview where Rowley was asked about his alcohol consumption was read out by O’Connor.
“The officer says: ‘Do you recall what you had had to drink before you found the box?’,” O’Connor says.
“Mr Rowley says, ‘Probably quite a lot.’
“Then he is asked: ‘Okay. Charlie, what’s quite a lot in your opinion?’
“He says: ‘Probably like three bottles of wine, about four bottles of beer.’
“Mr Rowley explains nine per cent beer.
“And the officer says: ‘Okay. And you believe that [is] the reason for you not remembering.’
“Mr Rowley says: ‘“Well, not saying that’s why I don’t remember, because that’s a poor excuse, I’m just saying I was probably drunk.’”
Rowley was so drunk the day before Dawn collapsed at his flat that he could not remember them making the bus journey from Salisbury, where they had spent the day, to Amesbury that evening. Asked by the police: “How do you know that you definitely got home on that… night?” Rowley simply replied: “Because we woke up in Amesbury the next day.” (Day 3, p54)
Later on Day 22 (p157) of the proceedings, Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry: “[I]t’s really important [to understand] … that I don’t think we’re ever actually going to know where Charlie found the novichok.”
There is in fact no evidence that Rowley found the package containing the bottle at all. Once again, this is purely a suggestion. All we know is the bottle apparently turned up in his flat in Amesbury on 11 July, three days after Dawn died.
A written statement — undated and unsigned — from now-retired Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Philip Murphy, who was in charge of the investigation into the alleged poisonings of Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess but did not give evidence to the inquiry in person (and was, somewhat confusingly, represented at the inquiry by Cmdr Dominic Murphy of Counter Terrorism Command) says that when Rowley was shown pictures of the box and its packaging he initially “did not recognise it and did not think that was the box with the bottle in it” (p25, paragraph 111).
The bottle was seemingly found on a kitchen work surface after police had been searching the property for at least five days.
Many people had been at Rowley’s flat in the days before Dawn collapsed there, and there is a suggestion it had been “cuckooed” — that is, taken over by local drug dealers and addicts who lived a similar lifestyle to Rowley’s.
It is just as plausible that one of the people who frequented the flat left the bottle in the kitchen, as it is that Rowley had picked up the bottle in Salisbury on or around 4 March 2018 and unknowingly brought it with him when he moved from Salisbury to Amesbury on 18 May 2018.
There is no evidence for either of these possibilities — they are both purely suggestions — but it makes the point: Rowley’s account of finding the bottle is unreliable. In a legal context it could be said to lack probative value.
It bears repeating that the inquiry depends almost entirely on Rowley’s testimony for a critical aspect of the case it is investigating: how Dawn Sturgess came to “spray” herself with novichok — allegedly discarded by Russian secret agents in Salisbury — and how her death was a consequence of their alleged attempt to kill Sergei Skripal.
It also bears repeating that Rowley never appeared before the inquiry.
“[W]e had planned for Mr Rowley to give evidence … and, of course, had he done so he would have been able to cover those matters in sequence,” O’Connor told Lord Hughes early in the proceedings (Day 3, p50). “For various reasons, he isn’t now giving evidence and is timetabled to appear… towards the end of the hearings in November.”
But this “timetabled” appearance didn’t happen. For whatever unspecified reasons, Rowley did not give personal evidence to the inquiry at any point.
Despite Rowley’s inability to recall important details about the bottle, such as where and when he found it, there are some details about the bottle and what he did with it that Rowley was apparently able to remember very clearly at the time. He gave an account of these details to ITV News — and because of his account to ITV they became details that the inquiry had to address.
These are the details already mentioned: Rowley’s statements that the bottle was boxed and sealed in plastic, with the nozzle packaged separately from the bottle, and that he “tipped” some of the liquid in the bottle onto his hands while attaching the nozzle to the bottle before giving it to Dawn.
As we know, Dawn seemingly experienced symptoms within 15 minutes, was horribly injured, and died — but it was several hours before Rowley was affected by the same poison that apparently killed her, and he survived.
Rowley’s survival has been explained because he said he quickly rinsed the liquid off his hands under the tap (Day 3, p80). However, a Counter Terrorism Police document presented to the inquiry states that before washing his hands Rowley initially wiped them on his jeans.
“His first instinct,” the document says, “is to wipe his hands on his jeans, front and back (‘my hands were covered with the stuff’).”
The document provides a diagram of Rowley’s jeans with readings of the supposed levels of novichok contamination found on them (see page 9 of the PDF document here: ‘Rowley spills nerve agent on his hands and wipes them on his jeans’).
This detail is significant to the question of the toxicity of novichok because the contents of the bottle were supposed to be so deadly that they were capable of killing thousands of people — an assertion made many times in the UK media over the years, and repeated by MPs in the UK Parliament.
This assertion that the contents of the bottle could potentially have killed thousands of people was also made to the inquiry by the anonymous expert ‘MK26’ — “the lead DSTL scientific advisor to the police investigations into the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings” — who said in written testimony that “the quantity of liquid remaining in the bottle is estimated to be sufficient to provide thousands of lethal doses in humans”.
During the inquiry, novichok was compared to the British-developed nerve agent VX, believed to be the most deadly nerve agent known to man at the time — 170 times more deadly than sarin.
Novichok is supposed to be five to eight times more lethal even than VX.
On Day 9 (p94) of the inquiry the anonymous expert ‘FT49’ — “a specialist in the fields of toxicology and pharmacology” who works at “DSTL Porton Down within the chemical, biological and radiological division” — said: “The calculated human lethal dose of VX is in the order of 10 milligrams on skin, which is equivalent to eight or so grains of sand.”
O’Connor goes on to ask ‘FT49’: “Noting the sort of public claims that Novichok is even more lethal than VX, it follows if that were right then an even smaller amount could be fatal; is that fair?”
‘FT49’ replies: “Yes, indeed, yes. That’s fair.”
Ten milligrams is 0.01 of gram, so if novichok was twice as deadly as VX a lethal dose would be 0.005 of a gram. But novichok has been reported to be more deadly even than ‘FT49’ told the inquiry. ‘MK26’ said a fatal dose on the skin would be equivalent to “a third to a sixth of a grain of salt” (Day 16, p34), and in July 2018 the British professor of environmental toxicology Alistair Hay told US-based broadcaster NPR that a lethal dose would be “maybe 50 to 100 micrograms” — that is, 0.00005 of a gram or a tiny fraction of a grain of sand.
We shall hear from Prof Hay again later, but to recap: Rowley supposedly spilled some of this extremely toxic substance on his hands and wiped them on his trousers before washing his hands under the tap. He then gave the bottle containing what remained of the liquid to his partner, who he said became seriously ill very rapidly after she was allegedly exposed to the nerve agent.
But when Dawn was rushed to hospital in Salisbury that morning, Rowley remained in Amesbury. He was apparently unaffected by the poison. He picked up his Methadone prescription at a chemist, and then went to a free hog roast event hosted by a nearby Baptist church.
The novichok he was exposed to and had wiped on his trousers apparently took significant effect on him only after he went back to his flat with his friend Sam Hobson later that afternoon. So far as we know, no-one he came into contact with over the course of that day was injured or became ill.
This includes Hobson, who Rowley was initially convinced had poisoned him while they were in his flat. Hobson was apparently ruled out as a suspect on the basis of his movements, as recorded by his mobile phone data — and Lord Hughes suggested that Rowley was simply confused.
DCI Murphy’s written statement says (p14, paragraph 64): “[Rowley] kept referencing Sam Hobson particularly [during police interviews on 9 and 10 July 2018]. Sam Hobson had been nominated as a significant witness and we already had an account from him and I also asked officers to obtain a warrant to access his phone data to corroborate his movements.
“Ultimately, there was no intelligence or evidence to suggest his involvement in the poisoning.”
“Sam Hobson was the person that Charlie was with when he fell ill in Muggleton Road, so, sir, he was particularly focused on Sam Hobson being responsible,” Cmdr Murphy told the inquiry on Day 22 (p15).
“Yes, no doubt the explanation is confusion, but he was thinking in his head that he had been poisoned by Sam,” Lord Hughes replies.
“But it appears that … there was no evidence or intelligence to support that suggestion,” O’Connor says.
“Yes and that’s subsequently shown to be the case as well,” Murphy replies.
And that’s as much curiosity as the inquiry showed about Sam Hobson.
The inquiry also showed a marked lack of curiosity about important details contained in Professor Guy Rutty’s pathology report on the drugs that were found in Dawn’s system after she collapsed.
Point 4. The drugs detected in undetectable amounts
As with the point about Rowley wiping novichok on his jeans, the fact that Dawn Sturgess was found by the pathologist Prof Rutty to have taken recreational drugs before she died may not seem to be significant at first, but once again we need to look at the context.
An important aspect of the inquiry from the point of view of the Sturgess family was to clearly establish that, unlike Rowley, Dawn was not a drug addict and was not known to the police as a convicted drug user or dealer.
There is no question that Dawn was an alcoholic and “suffered from a long-term dependence on alcohol, which limited her ability to work and affected her personal life”, as the inquiry heard (Day 3, p24) but, insofar as alcohol is distinguished from illegal drugs, she was not an addict.
This was important to the Sturgess family because Dawn had previously been described as a drug addict in Wiltshire police documents, and at the start of the inquiry’s proceedings the police issued an apology for doing so.
“There [were] reasons to suspect that [Dawn] may have become unwell due to her association with drugs,” Deputy Chief Constable (DCC) Paul Mills, representing Wiltshire Police, told the inquiry (Day 2, p47). “But notwithstanding that, there was no police intelligence that she was a drug user and in relation to that I would like to, on behalf of the Chief Constable and Wiltshire Police, apologise for that internal error to the family. I can only try and understand the impact of that further to their loss.”
Nevertheless, as DCC Mills indicated in his apology — and as was the case with Sergei and Yulia Skripal — a provisional diagnosis of the paramedics who went to Rowley’s flat on the morning of 30 June 2018 to respond to Dawn after she collapsed was that she could have taken a drugs overdose. In the context of her relationship with Rowley, this does not seem unreasonable.
One of the paramedics, Fred Thompson, testified to the inquiry that he gave Dawn the drug Narcan [nalaxone, an antidote to opiates] “because [her] eyes were initially pinpoint [and this was] to rule out any form of opiate overdose” (Day 5, p18). This treatment, he said, had no effect.
However, the paramedics were principally concerned with the fact that when they arrived at the Amesbury flat Dawn was in cardiac arrest, and their primary focus was on her life support and resuscitation.
At one point, while his colleagues attended to Dawn, Thompson took the opportunity to ask Rowley about Dawn’s medical history.
“I took myself away from the clinical side of the resuscitation and made a point to go and speak to Charlie to get a more detailed, in-depth history and past medical history of Dawn,” Thompson told the inquiry. “[This] would enable us to build the bigger picture of our treatment options and likely causes of the cardiac arrest that we were dealing with at the time.”
“What did Charlie tell you about Dawn’s medical history?” Émilie Pottle KC — another counsel for the Dawn Sturgess inquiry — asks Thompson.
“He couldn’t recall much of the past medical history from any conditions or diseases, sort of things like asthma, diabetes, he couldn’t remember much of that,” Thompson replies. “But he did say from a recreational point of view that Dawn was not an illicit drug user and she was alcoholic and never touched drugs.”
Rowley was either lying about this or ignorant of what kind of drugs Dawn had been taking, because Prof Rutty’s report showed there was evidence from Dawn’s urine sample — taken on 30 June at 11pm, the evening of the day she was admitted to hospital — that she had taken cocaine. The sample showed traces of cocaine and benzoylecgonine — a signal chemical created by the body as it processes cocaine in the liver, known as a metabolite.
Benzoylecgonine is not a metabolite that remains in the body for very long. It is generally detectable in urine samples up to four days after someone has taken cocaine, or 10 days in heavy users.
It seems unlikely that Rowley did not know Dawn had taken cocaine, and quite possible that he had been her supplier. The inquiry heard that “Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were in a happy and committed relationship for approximately 16 months prior to her death” (Day 3, p24); the inquiry also heard that Rowley was known to the police not only as a dealer of heroin, but also of crack cocaine (Day 4, p91), and that he had “supplied drugs from [Dawn’s] address in Salisbury” (statement of DCC Paul Mills, p15, paragraph 40).
It is worth mentioning that this was not the first time Rowley had been involved in circumstances leading to the death of a girlfriend. A police document presented to the inquiry showed that almost exactly two years earlier Rowley’s girlfriend at the time, Natasha Davis — a convicted drug dealer herself — had died of an overdose while he was present.
“Rowley did not call for medical assistance for Natasha when she overdosed,” the document states. “Rowley was aware she had taken too much but put her to bed where she died.”
The fact that Prof Rutty found benzoylecgonine in Dawn’s system is significant, but not because it showed she had taken cocaine. The significance lies in the fact he was given the levels of benzoylecgonine in her system by the laboratory in Birmingham that analysed her urine samples. Because these levels were low, Rutty was able to determine that Dawn had taken cocaine some days previously, not immediately before she collapsed.
Remarkably, this was almost the only drug or metabolite identified in Dawn’s samples that Prof Rutty was given quantitative information about.
The Birmingham laboratory analysis showed that Dawn had a large number of other drugs in her system — for example, nicotine and its metabolite cotinine — but in every other case Prof Rutty was not given the levels at which they were found to be present. He was merely told that they were there. The exceptions were benzoylecgonine and, to a limited extent, the anti-depressant mirtazapine and the sedative zopiclone, which Dawn had been prescribed not long before and were found to be present at high levels.
Prof Rutty went into more detail about this during his appearance before the inquiry (Day 11, p43).
“The test that came back from Birmingham did not provide detail about the amount of drugs found, simply identifying presence?” O’Connor asks Rutty.
“That’s correct, sir,” Rutty replies.
“But there is a little more to say, is there not, which you have recorded in the next part of your report?” O’Connor says. “First of all, the report that came back from Birmingham referred to the fact that the benzo — sorry, you’re going to have to help me with that word.”
“It’s the metabolite of cocaine,” Rutty says.
“How do you pronounce it?” Lord Hughes asks.
“I can’t pronounce it myself, to be honest with you,” Rutty replies, as the inquiry’s lawyers and barristers are seen to laugh on the YouTube stream.
“No, I’m not surprised,” Hughes says, smiling. “Anyway, it’s the metabolite of cocaine?
“Yes,” Rutty replies.
“Exceptionally, the report does indicate a level for that drug and… the opinion expressed [by] Birmingham [was] that that level did not suggest recent use, yes?” O’Connor asks Rutty.
“That’s correct, sir,” Rutty replies.
“That’s one exception to the quantification point,” O’Connor says. “Then, secondly, you have recorded that the report from Birmingham also stated that the mirtazapine … and zopiclone show large peaks suggesting recent use or high dose … to that extent there’s a start of quantifying them, but there is no scientific quantification provided there either.”
“Yes, it’s just making an observation of what they’re seeing … they’re just noting that … there’s a high peak there, but unfortunately it doesn’t provide any further information,” Rutty replies.
The Birmingham laboratory that analysed Dawn’s samples was named by Rutty as the “Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospital NHS Trust laboratory”. This was almost certainly City Assays, a specialised toxicology laboratory that is part of the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospital NHS Trust and that provides screening services to NHS hospitals around the UK that need to identify drugs of abuse.
To do this, laboratories like City Assays use a process called liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, an extremely sensitive technique that can find tiny traces of drugs and their metabolites both qualitatively and quantitatively in urine samples — which is to say, Prof Rutty should have been informed about the levels of all the drugs found in Dawn’s system.
Furthermore, if Dawn’s samples were properly stored, Rutty could have been provided this missing information through a new set of tests months or even years later. Why he was not given this information is unclear given its significance, his role as a pathologist, and his seniority. He cautiously reserved his right to change his view if the data was made available to him.
“I would advise that a further statement considering the quantification … of any drug identified … is sought from the toxicology laboratory where the tests were undertaken,” Rutty said in a signed statement for the inquiry that he prepared in July 2024 (p13, line 407). “In the event that such a statement is prepared and the quantification results are released … then I would request sight of these documents.”
The extreme sensitivity of the kind of devices that were used to identify the drugs in Dawn’s system is something we shall return to when we look at the claim that the two Russian secret agents left behind traces of novichok in the London hotel room where they stayed.
Clearly hampered by the lack of quantitative information about the drugs that Dawn had taken — but seeking to understand if any of these substances could have contributed to her collapse and cardiac arrest — Rutty told the inquiry that he ruled out the drugs found in her system that he believed had been given to her by the paramedics who responded to the flat in Amesbury, or by doctors after she was taken to hospital in Salisbury.
“I have revisited the hospital notes and have identified … the drugs [that were] given to Dawn Sturgess at therapeutic dosages, post collapse and cardiac arrest, as part of her treatment,” Rutty’s statement reads (p11, line 354). “This would account for their presence within this test.”
Having eliminated the drugs that he believed had been given to Dawn as part of her treatment, Rutty was left with only two drugs to consider as potentially causing or contributing to her collapse: the anti-depressants zopiclone and mirtazapine.
“Based on the information that has been made available to me the only two drugs which need to be considered as to whether they could have caused the collapse of the deceased are the zopiclone and the mirtazapine,” Rutty’s statement reads.
Rutty goes on to state that he does not believe an overdose of zopiclone would cause a sudden cardiac arrest even in combination with alcohol, and he notes that mirtazapine “in excess can… cause central nervous system depression”. However, he is careful to point out that without the quantification results — which he implies should be available — he is unable to draw firm conclusions about whether or not these two drugs contributed to Dawn’s collapse.
“I can make no further comment with regards to these two drugs as I do not have the quantification results,” Rutty’s statement continues. “I do not know whether despite the high peak the level of drugs were within the quoted therapeutic ranges, all be it [sic] at the upper end, or whether they were within quoted toxic ranges.”
Apart from these two drugs, there was another drug identified in Dawn’s test results that could have contributed to or caused her collapse — but Rutty eliminated it from his analysis because he knew it had been given to her as part of her treatment: fentanyl. The inquiry heard that Dawn was given fentanyl when she arrived at hospital (Day 10, p167).
Fentanyl is an anaesthetic used in a medical context but, as we know, it is also a drug of abuse: the same drug that paramedics and doctors initially believed the Skripals could have taken recreationally, leading to their collapse. Police Inspector Marcus Beresford-Smith told the inquiry he also initially believed that fentanyl could have been the cause of Rowley’s collapse when he attended the Amesbury flat on the evening of 30 June, possibly because it was from a “bad batch” (Day 5, p181).
The inquiry failed to clarify this critical point. Dawn could have taken fentanyl before collapsing, but without knowing the levels at which it was found in her system there was no way for Rutty to find out. In the absence of quantification results Rutty decided fentanyl could only have been given to Dawn as part of her treatment after her collapse, but he had no real evidence to support that decision.
Questioning the cause of Dawn’s cardiac arrest and death was not part of the inquiry’s remit. The determination had already been made that she was killed by novichok disguised as perfume in a boxed and sealed presentation pack. How and why it came to be sealed, however, was a problem.
Point 5. The portable heat sealer without a purpose
As we know, Rowley told ITV News that the bottle he gave to Dawn had been boxed and sealed in plastic, and that he had opened the package and attached the pump dispenser to the bottle before presenting it to her.
The fact that the bottle had reportedly been boxed and sealed in plastic gave rise to speculation in the media that the bottle that was found at Rowley’s Amesbury flat was not in fact the bottle that had been used to contaminate Skripal’s front door, and was instead some kind of back-up weapon that was not required by the Russian secret agents and abandoned.
This possibility was considered by the inquiry, although Cmdr Murphy said he had a “strong assessment” that the bottle that was found in Amesbury was the actual weapon used to contaminate Skripal’s door (Day 19, p167).
Accompanying the media speculation that the bottle found in Amesbury was unused was the suggestion that the bottle that had actually been used on Skripal’s door was still undiscovered somewhere. This suggestion maintains the over-arching narrative whereby a bottle of novichok was used by Russian secret agents, which they then discarded.
However, if the bottle that was found in Rowley’s flat was not in fact the bottle that had been used to contaminate Skripal’s door, there is no reason to suppose that a fake perfume bottle of any kind was used and discarded, still less any evidence to that effect. The poison could have been applied using a syringe disguised as a pen, for argument’s sake, or the tip of a specially-adapted umbrella — or any other imaginary means that might emanate from spy fiction.
An even more improbable alternative explanation for Rowley saying that the bottle was boxed and sealed might be that the Russian secret agents in Salisbury had brought with them some kind of portable, battery-powered heat sealing device, which they used to seal the bottle in plastic after using it.
Given that the Russian secret agents would have had to take apart their assassination weapon first — exposing themselves to immense danger in the process of doing so, if the bottle genuinely contained an incredibly deadly neurotoxin — this suggestion was roundly mocked at the time by independent journalists and bloggers who were following the case.
In 2020 Rob Slane, a resident of Salisbury who wrote extensively about the case at his website The Blogmire (now no longer online, but available through the Internet Archive) listed the idea that the two Russian secret agents had “brought a cellophane wrapping machine to Salisbury to wrap the used box up in, before discarding it” as one of 40 “absurd, implausible and sometimes downright impossible things that one has to believe” to accept the official account of events.
Similarly, the blogger and journalist Iain Davis referred to a portable “cellophane sealing machine” in his wonderfully sardonic 30 minute video report ‘Skripal Salisbury Chemical Weapons Attack’ from 2019. “For some inexplicable reason,” Davis says, “in an incredibly dangerous and totally unnecessary manoeuvre, the pair decided to remove the spray nozzle from the lethal bottle of novichok before somehow managing to seal it up again inside a cellophane-wrapped perfume gift box”.
But the inquiry took no account of such sceptical voices in the alternative media — and almost no questions have been asked by journalists working in the mainstream media over the years since the Salisbury events.
And so the inquiry heard that the two Russian secret agents probably did bring a portable heat sealer with them to Salisbury with which to seal up their assassination weapon in plastic before then dumping it in a bin.
Not only did the inquiry hear testimony to this effect, but it was taken at face value by the lawyers involved and Lord Hughes — with the theory developed by lead counsel O’Connor and supported by statements from counter-terrorism chief Cmdr Murphy. No questions were asked about the rationale. The inquiry even spent an afternoon interviewing a forensic expert in the kind of marks that heat sealers make on plastic wrapping.
The idea that two Russian secret agents in Salisbury had a portable heat sealer with them was first suggested on Day 16, during testimony by the anonymous expert ‘MK26’, “the lead DSTL scientific advisor to the police investigations into the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings”.
‘MK26’ was granted total anonymity by the inquiry: their testimony was not streamed on YouTube and is only available to read in transcript.
Adam Straw KC, representing the Sturgess family, asked ‘MK26’ about a written submission that had been provided to the inquiry before proceedings began, part of which was put on screen for participants to read. The submission is a partial transcript of ‘MK26’ being asked questions by counter-terrorism police, and Straw’s main concern is how long the heat sealing process might have taken.
“Question 19 there, you are asked: ‘How were the wrappings sealed?’”, Straw says (Day 16, p196). “I think [your] response is: ‘Small portable heat sealers are widely available.’ Can you explain any more of that, please?”
“This is clearly outside of my area of expertise,” ‘MK26’ replies. “However, you can go onto Google or to Amazon and find small portable heat sealers for plastic bags for kitchen use predominantly. They are the size of a small stapler, so quite small, and are able to firmly seal plastic and so it is possible that that is — that that type of device could have been used.”
“The question [then] is: how long does it take to put the plastic encased items into the box?” Straw asks. “I think [the police] are asking here about plastic wrappers around — if that was the state that they were in, how long would it take those to put into the Nina Ricci box. The answer is 10 seconds, but then it’s also added there: ‘To heat seal, an approximation of two minutes was given.’ Is that your answer first?”
“Yes, but we were guessing and I think you will hear from a packaging expert who may be better placed to comment than I am,” ‘MK26’ replies.
The suggestion that a portable heat sealer was used by the Russian secret agents was made more emphatically by Keith Asman, head of forensics and digital investigations for the police’s south-east region counter-terrorism unit, in his testimony to the inquiry on the following day, Day 17 (p152).
“The reality is I believe that they used it [the bottle of novichok disguised as perfume], I believe they dismantled it, I believe they placed it into the plastic packaging and then, using a portable heat sealer, sealed some of the component parts of the device into plastic packaging, which then went into the box,” Asman said, as the YouTube feed showed lawyers in the background grinning and hiding smiles behind their hands.
“You might be right, Mr Asman, but … it’s not really based on a forensic analysis,” Lord Hughes says.
“There’s no forensic evidence whatsoever, sir, to support that — other than it slightly corroborates Mr Rowley’s account — although there were numerous accounts from him as to where [the bottle] may have come from and when,” Asman concedes.
On Day 19 (p165), O’Connor developed the portable heat sealer hypothesis with testimony from Cmdr Murphy as they considered the two Russian secret agents’ movements around Salisbury using a map of the city that notes the position of various CCTV cameras (p7 of the PDF here).
The secret agents were seen at various points on CCTV but there was apparently a 33-minute period — between 12.17pm and 12.50pm — when their movements were unaccounted for, and O’Connor presented a detailed theory about what they might have conspired to do during this time.
“As one factual possibility,” O’Connor asks Murphy, “would it have been possible after [the two Russian secret agents] disappeared from the camera … [for them] to walk down into Queen Elizabeth Gardens, go to those public toilets … pause in there to deal with the bottle, the components of the bottle, unpack it, put it into some plastic packaging, heat seal it, put it back into the box, then walk from there … to the Brown Street carpark, get rid of the box in the Brown Street car park bin and then find their way back to the High Street and walk up and reappear on those cameras that we can see within that period of time?”
“It’s entirely possible,” Murphy replies. “I think it would be quite challenging but entirely possible they could do that in 33 minutes, yes.”
“All I can do is ask you whether it’s possible,” O’Connor says.
Why the two secret agents might have decided to take apart and then seal up their bottle before dumping it is not a question O’Connor asks Murphy; nor did O’Connor explain what he meant by a “factual possibility” in describing his theory about their potential movements.
Straw, representing the Sturgess family, returned to this exchange while questioning Murphy the following day, Day 20 (p158). Straw’s main concern was then the question of how far the two Russian secret agents could have walked in Salisbury in the 33-minute window of time that is unaccounted for by the CCTV, given that they would have had to have spent some of that time in a public toilet using their portable heat sealer to seal up their assassination weapon in plastic.
Straw is clearly asking this because he wants to establish the distance the two secret agents could potentially have travelled through Salisbury before disposing of the novichok bottle in a bin. Like O’Connor, he was not remotely curious as to why the secret agents might have taken apart their assassination weapon and used a portable heat sealer to seal it into a presentation box before doing so, although this seems an obvious question.
“One question you were asked by Mr O’Connor yesterday was, is there time in that 33-minute period for them to go to Queen Elizabeth Gardens, disassemble the bottle and applicator, heat seal, package it and then get to Brown Street, and I think your answer was: ‘Quite challenging but possible’; is that right?” Straw asks Murphy.
“Yes, I think that would be challenging but it’s entirely possible,” Murphy replies.
“When you say ‘challenging’, do you mean in the time available?” Straw asks.
“Yes, in the time available, in the 33 minutes,” Murphy replies.
“Again on that hypothesis — Mr O’Connor’s hypothesis of going somewhere, dissembling it, packaging it and so and then disposing it somewhere — does your answer gives us a radius of how far they could have got in that period?” Straw asks.
“During the investigation I did actually produce some maps that do this,” Murphy replies. “They’re not immediately available unfortunately, but those maps show… where they could get in 33 minutes.”
“Assuming that they’re first going to go somewhere, disassemble it heat seal it, package it, that would give us a smaller area, wouldn’t it?” Straw asks.
“Yes, potentially, yes, albeit it’s very difficult for me to assess how long that would have taken, but yes,” Murphy replies.
And that’s where Straw’s questioning of Murphy on the subject of portable heat sealers ended.
On the afternoon of Day 21 the inquiry heard from Adam Wilson, a forensic scientist employed by a company called Cellmark Forensic Services who has expertise in marks, including the “examination of heat seals”.
Questioned by Francesca Whitelaw KC, another counsel to the inquiry, Wilson first testified that he had only been able to examine photographs of the plastic packaging apparently found by police at Rowley’s Amesbury flat provided to him on a DVD by the police, and not the packaging itself.
“Well, there may have been good reason for that,” says Lord Hughes, referring to the fact that the packaging had apparently been contaminated by the military grade nerve agent Rowley said he spilled on his hands.
Wilson testified that there were two distinct heat seals on the plastic packaging (Day 21, p179) and that both of them were “post manufacture”, with the second seal “for the purpose of holding the contents within a particular position” (p183).
Why the contents of the package would need to be sealed in such a way as to hold them in a particular position is a question that went unasked.
The closest the inquiry came to asking or answering the question of why the Russian secret agents would have taken the incredibly dangerous and unnecessary step of taking apart their weapon and then sealing it up in a presentation box before dumping it came in the closing statements on Day 24 from Lisa Giovannetti KC, the barrister representing the police (p109).
The secret agents’ use of a heat sealing device while they were in Salisbury was “consistent with steps being taken after the attack on the Skripals to repackage the container in a way which would keep safe somebody who had to handle it”, Giovannetti said.
This statement clearly raises more questions than it answers.
Who were the Russian secret agents trying to keep safe, to Giovannetti’s mind? They certainly did not disassemble the bottle for their own safety, as they would have exposed themselves to great danger while doing so, and could have simply sealed the bottle in a plastic bag without taking it apart.
Is Giovannetti suggesting that the secret agents had concern for the citizens of Salisbury, and ran the risk of accidentally killing themselves in a public toilet to protect the public? This seems even more unlikely, and she almost immediately went on to speak about the “the utter recklessness and callous disregard for public safety shown by those who were responsible for deploying and then discarding a military grade nerve agent on the streets of an English city” — a “recklessness” and “grotesque disregard for human life” the inquiry had heard about at length.
Directly before her remarks about the heat sealer and its unknown purpose, Giovannetti claimed that the amount of “empty space” in the bottle found in Rowley’s flat was “consistent, specifically” with the amount of liquid that would have been applied to Skripal’s door, and presented this to Lord Hughes as evidence that the bottle had been used.
Giovannetti here simply ignored the testimony that the inquiry had heard about Rowley spilling a substantial amount of the liquid on his hands, suggesting she was taking a very superficial view of the evidence.
Based on Giovannetti’s willingness to overlook this inconvenient testimony, the rationale of taking apart and sealing up the bottle of novichok in order to “keep safe somebody who had to handle it” — and the question of who that might be — are not problems she was likely to address or be troubled by.
What happened to this hypothetical portable heat sealer after Russian secret agents used it? Did they discard it as well, perhaps in the same bin that the bottle was supposedly dumped in?
The inquiry did not seek to ask or answer such questions either.
Point 6. The antidote given by accident
While the two Russian secret agents were apparently spending time in Salisbury dealing with their assassination weapon after they had used it — taking it apart, boxing it up, sealing it in plastic with their portable heat sealer and then apparently walking around looking for a bin to dump it in, their target — unknowingly contaminated — also travelled into Salisbury.
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia both seemingly touched the novichok that the two secret agents had earlier squirted or sprayed onto his front door handle as they left his house at around 1.30pm but, as with Rowley, it appears it took a few hours before they experienced significant effects (slightly more than two hours in the case of the Skripals, and apparently more than six hours in the case of Rowley).
Sergei apparently received a considerably higher dose of novichok than Yulia (possibly getting as much as 0.0000025 of gram into his system, if Professor Hay’s estimate about the lethality of the poison is correct — any more would have killed him).
The inquiry heard that Sergei left the house first and sat in his car while he waited for Yulia to get ready. She supposedly received a smaller dose, as a significant amount of the military grade nerve agent had seemingly been removed from the door handle by her father before she touched it herself.
“It’s my understanding that Sergei was the first to touch the door handle and likely remove the largest amount of gross contamination,” ‘FT49’ told the inquiry on Day 9 (p129). “Therefore … he had a considerably higher exposure dose … [and when] Yulia made contact with the door handle, most of that gross contamination had been removed.”
The inquiry heard that Sergei drove them to central Salisbury, where they parked in a supermarket car park. They then briefly fed ducks on the River Avon before going to a pub called The Mill at 1.45pm.
While they were feeding ducks some local boys joined them, and the inquiry was shown CCTV images of Sergei handing one of the boys some bread. Sergei’s hands had supposedly been contaminated with novichok shortly before, and the inquiry heard that one of the boys reportedly fell ill “for a day or two” afterwards. However, “no traces of the chemical weapon” were found in his system when he was “eventually tested”.
The director of public health at Wiltshire council at the time, Tracy Daszkiewicz, said “no wildlife were impacted and no children were exposed to [novichok] or became ill as a result of either [the Salisbury or the Amesbury] incident” when asked to comment in 2019 on the suggestion that boys had been contaminated — and ducks killed — by the novichok that had supposedly been on the Skripals’ hands.
The inquiry was shown CCTV of the Skripals in The Mill pub, with Yulia paying for their drinks with cash and later taking their empty glasses back to the bar. Although the glasses would have certainly been contaminated with novichok, there was no report that staff at The Mill pub became ill.
After leaving The Mill pub at around 2.15pm, the Skripals went to Zizzi’s restaurant, leaving at around 3.35pm. The inquiry was told (Day 15, p41) that there was no CCTV of them at the restaurant. There were no reports of kitchen or waiting staff becoming ill after touching the plates and cutlery the Skripals would have contaminated while they were there.
The lack of CCTV in Zizzi’s will become more significant in Part 2, where we will look at Yulia Skripal’s testimony about what happened there.
Just two minutes after they left Zizzi’s, at 3.37pm, CCTV showed Sergei and Yulia sitting on a bench near the restaurant in the central shopping area of Salisbury called The Maltings, where they apparently remained for about 30 minutes before members of the public realised they were in distress.
It is significant that neither Sergei or Yulia were able to appeal for help to the people passing by as they succumbed together to the effects of the military grade nerve agent that they had supposedly touched a couple of hours before.
The effects of novichok apparently came on almost simultaneously in them both, despite their very different physical characteristics and the separate, uncontrolled doses that they must have received when touching the front door of Sergei’s house.
Helen Ord, a medical doctor who happened to be passing by and became one of the first responders to Sergei and Yulia at the bench, told the inquiry that this was “very unusual” during her testimony.
“It’s very unusual for two people to be unwell at exactly the same moment, which was clearly what was happening,” Dr Ord said (Day 7, p26). “Why would two people in a public place be ill at exactly the same moment?”
The inquiry heard testimony from two paramedics who were subsequently called to the scene — Ian Parsons and Lisa Wood (Day 8) — but perhaps the most significant testimony came from a paramedic who treated Sergei Skripal in the ambulance that took him to Salisbury hospital.
This testimony, from a paramedic called Karl Bulpitt, was not given to the inquiry in person but came in the form of a written statement that was entered into evidence at the end of Day 8 — along with statements from several other paramedics — without examination.
In his statement Bulpitt describes attending the scene in a double-crewed ambulance driven by Zoey Thomas, an emergency care assistant, arriving at The Maltings at 4.44pm. Yulia is at this point being attended to by three paramedics including Parsons, and Bulpitt and Thomas begin to treat Sergei, who Bulpitt describes as “vomiting heavily and sweating profusely with a lot of mucus secreting from his nose”.
Joined by Lisa Wood, Bulpitt and Thomas manage to get Sergei, who had become “hypertonic” [his body had become rigid] into the back of their ambulance, where he continued to vomit. They were there joined by another paramedic, Richard Miller, a highly experienced critical care specialist from the air ambulance support team, and Bulpitt handed over to him as the senior medic now present.
“I left Zoe, Richard and Lisa to treat [Sergei] whilst I went to prepare … drugs,” Bulpitt writes in his statement. “I took hold of two vials of naloxone [a drug used to treat people who have taken an overdose of opiates such as heroin or fentanyl] and a syringe but the male began to be sick again so I jumped to the head end [of the stretcher Sergei was on] to clear his airway. In doing so I knocked over the drugs bag which went over the ambulance.”
“Once I had cleared his airway I picked up the two vials which I thought were naloxene,” Bulpitt’s statement continues. “I drew them up and administered them … [i]t was [then] decided that we could not do any more for him at the scene so we left to go to the hospital at around 1706 hrs… Zoey drove and Richard, Lisa and I remained treating [Sergei] in the back.
“Once the male was in the full care of the A&E medical team we left the hospital … Back at the station Zoe and another colleague Robyn cleaned out the ambulance whilst I went to replenish the drugs bag. Whilst I was doing this, I realised that I was not missing any naloxone which I expected to be as I had used two vials on the male [Sergei].
“I searched the bag for what was missing and noticed that two vials containing Atropine were missing. I then realised that I must have administered Atropine instead of naloxone as a result of knocking over the drugs bag … I reported this on the Datix Service [an incident reporting system] and returned the drugs bag to the rack. We carry Atropine to treat the symptoms of systemic bradycardia — slow heart rate.”
Bulpitt’s supposed mistake under pressure was, by any measure, an extraordinarily fortunate one from Sergei Skripal’s point of view. Atropine is not only a treatment for bradycardia, but as it happens is also one of the two main treatments for nerve agent poisoning — specifically, organophosphate nerve agent poisoning, the class of neurotoxins to which VX and novichok belong that were originally derived from pesticides.
Often loosely described as a nerve agent antidote and apparently ascribed extraordinary therapeutic power in the case of Sergei Skripal, atropine is more accurately described as a symptomatic or supportive treatment for organophosphate poisoning because it does not reverse the underlying cause of the poisoning — it merely mitigates some of the effects.
This distinction between an antidote and supportive treatment is critical, especially given the claims about novichok’s extreme lethality and the suggestion that Bulpitt’s accidental administration of atropine had somehow saved Skripal’s life.
Atropine needs to be used in combination with another drug, pralidoxime or 2-PAM, to effectively counter nerve agent toxicity — and both need to be administered as rapidly as possible after exposure for the victim to stand a chance of avoiding death or permanent and severe injury.
It is worth looking at how Steven Morris of The Guardian reported on the extraordinary revelation that Sergei had received treatment for nerve agent poisoning by accident. In an article headlined ‘Paramedic gave Sergei Skripal novichok antidote by chance, inquiry hears’, Morris writes:
“A paramedic has described the extraordinary moment he knocked over a drugs bag as he treated the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and then by chance gave him a nerve agent antidote that may have saved his life.”
“Karl Bulpitt told the inquiry into the Wiltshire poisonings that he meant to administer naloxone, a drug that counters the effects of an opioid overdose, to Skripal as he was taken by ambulance to hospital.”
“But as he tried to keep Skripal breathing, he knocked over his drugs bag and then picked up vials of the nerve agent antidote atropine by mistake. It was only when Bulpitt returned to base that he realised.”
What is remarkable about Morris’s reporting here is not only that he describes atropine as an antidote, giving the reader the impression that the effects of incredibly deadly organophosphate nerve agents such as VX can be effectively reversed by a relatively common generic drug derived from the Belladonna plant, but also that he gives the reader the strong impression Bulpitt delivered his testimony to the inquiry in person, rather than in the form of a written statement that was entered into evidence at the end of a day without it being read out in part or considered by the inquiry at all.
To his credit, Morris covered the inquiry more thoroughly than most — The Guardian was the only mainstream outlet to report in any detail on the suggestion that the two Russian secret agents had a portable heat sealer with them in Salisbury, although this was also mentioned by the BBC.
However, Morris has form when it comes to misrepresenting details about the treatment that the victims of the novichok allegedly used in Salisbury received.
Back in July 2019, before Dawn’s daughter successfully challenged the original coroner’s decision concerning her mother’s death in the High Court and forced the UK government to set up the inquiry, Morris reported a remarkable detail about the treatment Charlie Rowley received — a detail that seemed to explain his survival. In an article headlined ‘Revealed: anti-nerve agent drug was used for first time in UK to save novichok victim’, Morris and his colleague Caroline Bannock wrote:
“Paramedics saved the life of one of the Wiltshire novichok victims by administering an anti-nerve agent drug at the scene that had never been used on a patient before in the UK, it can be revealed … Rowley was given an anti-nerve agent drug that British crews began to carry at the height of the al-Qaida threat but had not used until then.”
But when the inquiry was set up five years later and as hearings were about to begin, Morris’s story changed. The “anti-nerve agent drug that British crews began to carry at the height of the al-Qaida threat” — a drug that had supposedly never been used in the UK before — turned into the generic drug atropine: a drug derived from a plant that had been known for its medicinal properties since the 3rd Century BC.
Remarkably, Morris still called it an “anti-novichok” drug as if it had been recently developed for the purpose.
“The Guardian revealed in 2019 that paramedics used an anti-novichok drug, atropine, on Rowley, which may have saved his life,” Morris wrote in June 2024, suggesting atropine has extraordinary effectiveness when used to treat exposure to military grade nerve agents.
It should be mentioned that the CEO of DSTL Porton Down at the time of the Salisbury events in 2018 told Sky News that novichok is so deadly that there is no antidote available to counteract its effects, and a Soviet-era scientist who had apparently worked on the development of novichok before defecting to the US said that any treatment would not be able to prevent catastrophic injury to anyone exposed to it, such is its toxicity.
It should also be mentioned that there are protocols in place when paramedics decide to administer drugs to patients at the scene of an incident or in an ambulance, with a second person required to check the specific drug before it is administered. These were described to the inquiry by the paramedic Lisa Wood in her testimony on Day 8 (p97).
“For any drugs that we administer there is a two-step check, so you check it yourself and then you check — you get somebody — normally it’s a colleague … to check the drug before I gave it, just to make sure it’s the one I want to give,” Wood said.
Clearly, this did not happen when Bulpitt accidentally administered atropine to Sergei Skripal in the ambulance, even though he had three colleagues with him at the time. Under the circumstances Bulpitt describes, it would appear he could have given Sergei almost any drug that had spilled from his drugs bag, and like many drugs atropine is itself toxic at the wrong dose and under the wrong conditions.
Mark Faulkner, a consultant in emergency medicine who was appointed by the inquiry to review the ambulance service’s response to the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings, gave testimony on Day 11 and provided his view of the mistake Bulpitt had made (p144).
“There will be times as an ambulance clinician where there is no one available to check a drug,” Faulkner said. “That wasn’t the case in Salisbury and therefore I would be critical that a drug check wasn’t done.”
“We have heard here, of course, that the accidental administration in this particular instance was not only unlikely to have harmed Mr Skripal, but… in your report you indicate that it could well have been a life saving intervention, albeit in error?” Whitelaw asks Faulkner.
“Yes,” Faulkner confirms.
Other witnesses and lawyers gave testimony to the inquiry to the effect that Bulpitt’s extraordinary mistake could have saved Sergei’s life — or at least significantly aided his recovery.
On the afternoon of Day 9 (p120) ‘FT49’ told the inquiry that “the inadvertent administration of atropine… was an excellent drug dosing error to make and… was… clinically beneficial in maintaining Sergei’s heart rate”, as lead counsel O’Connor smiled and snorted through his nose.
On Day 24 (p140) Bridget Dolan KC, a barrister representing the South West Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT), told the inquiry that “Mr Skripal was erroneously administered atropine rather than naloxone … although this error was somewhat fortuitous in hindsight, given the reversing effect of atropine upon nerve agent poisoning, SWASFT still recognised that this was … a significant drug error”.
While Bulpitt may have inadvertently helped Sergei Skripal by mistake, Yulia Skripal was not so lucky: she did not receive atropine by accident while she was in the back of an ambulance.
Perhaps because of this, the inquiry was told that when she arrived at hospital she was in a significantly worse condition than her father.
However, she made a swift and very unexpected recovery.
(Next article in series) Part 2: Yulia wakes up, and the novichok that vanished from a hotel room
Tim Norman lives on the south coast of England and began his career in technology journalism in the 1990s writing about the then-emerging internet. He has worked in editorial production roles for local, national and international media and on daily, weekly and monthly publications. A member of the NUJ, he was Father of the Chapel at The Argus in Brighton when the newspaper went on strike in 2011.
Sights set on Somaliland: The threat of a total US–UK–Israeli takeover
By Kit Klarenberg – The Cradle – April 3, 2025
In recent weeks, Somaliland has drawn unprecedented attention from western media. As Israeli and US officials scramble to find a destination to forcibly relocate Gaza’s population, the globally unrecognized breakaway territory is increasingly floated as a potential solution.
Multiple mainstream reports suggest Tel Aviv and Washington are making quiet overtures to Hargeisa. On 14 March, the Financial Times revealed:
“A US official briefed on Washington’s initial contacts with Somaliland’s presidency said discussions had begun about a possible deal to recognize the de facto state in return for the establishment of a military base near the port of Berbera on the Red Sea coast.”
Somaliland’s President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi has made international recognition his central foreign policy objective. Since the territory declared independence in 1991, no country has recognized it as a sovereign state. But late last year, before entering the White House, US President Donald Trump made the surprise announcement that he intended to officially recognize Somaliland, which would make Washington the first foreign capital to do so.
For the internationally isolated statelet, the prospect of a permanent US military footprint, which would shield the East African statelet from Somalia’s endemic instability, is no doubt enormously appealing, especially as it would be attached to official recognition of statehood by a major global power.
Search for a new ‘Nakba’
From Washington’s perspective, the deal would yield far more than just a convenient dumping ground for displaced Palestinians, evicted to make way for Trump’s fantasized “Gaza-Lago.” Somaliland’s strategic location on the Red Sea makes it an ideal staging post for operations against Yemen.
A current map of the Horn of Africa
Such a move would grant the US a critical new foothold in the Horn of Africa at a time when American and French forces are being ejected from countries across the continent at breakneck speed.
It could also serve as a counterweight to China and Russia’s expanding presence in northern Africa. Beijing established its first overseas military base in neighbouring Djibouti in 2017, and has since emerged as an aggressive critic of western policies in the region – while also welcoming Iranian naval vessels at its ports.
The strategic utility of recognizing Somaliland is not lost on Washington’s foreign policy architects. Project 2025 – a sprawling, right-wing policy blueprint by the Heritage Foundation, intended as a roadmap for Trump’s second term—explicitly advocates “[countering] malign Chinese activity” in Africa. It specifically recommended “the recognition of Somaliland statehood as a hedge against the US’s deteriorating position in Djibouti.”
Another neocolonial outpost
Keep in mind that Trump’s interest in the territory was made public well before Somaliland was floated as a relocation site for Gaza’s 2.4 million Palestinians. In November 2024, former British defence secretary Gavin Williamson announced he had held “really good meetings” with Trump’s “policy leads” on the matter, expressing confidence that recognition was on the horizon.
Williamson has long been an ardent advocate of Somaliland’s independence, regularly undertaking all-expenses-paid trips to the breakaway territory, and receiving honorary citizenship for his lobbying efforts.
Williamson’s interest exposes a rarely acknowledged truth: Somaliland is, in practice, a modern British colony. Though it claimed independence from Somalia in 1991 and was formally granted independence by Britain in 1960, the territory remains under London’s shadow.
Should Palestinians be forcefully relocated there, they would be trapped in yet another open-air prison – under the watchful eye of British-trained security forces with a long history of violent repression.
‘ASI Management’
In April 2019, British government contractor Aktis Strategy abruptly declared bankruptcy, leaving staff unpaid and suppliers out of pocket, despite having secured tens of millions of pounds from the UK’s Foreign Office for “development” programs across Africa and West Asia.
The Somaliland Chronicle published a detailed exposé on the company’s collapse, which came while it was overseeing a “justice and security sector reform project” in the statelet.
Official records reveal that between 2017 and 2022, London allocated over £18 million (around $23.5 million) to that project alone. It was one of many UK-financed schemes in the breakaway region that placed Somaliland’s state architecture – government, military, judiciary, prisons, police, intelligence – under effective British management.
Internal files reviewed by The Cradle lay bare the extent of this control.
One document details how notorious British intelligence cutout Adam Smith International (ASI) provided “ongoing training and mentoring” to Somaliland’s National Intelligence Agency and Rapid Response Unit, while managing the territory’s forensics services, border surveillance, and even prosecution procedures via the Attorney General’s Office. The British-created Counter-Terrorism Unit was established in 2012 with Foreign Office funds – “under ASI management.”
Elsewhere, ASI boasts of its “proven history of establishing close professional relationships” with senior government, armed forces, police, “security sector,” and Ministry of Defense officials. One file notes the contractor “deployed ex-UK military advisers” to train Somaliland’s army and coastguard intelligence units, “[mentoring] senior officers in leadership, management, and military doctrine,” and even drafted legislation later adopted as law.
Meanwhile, British contractor Albany Associates focused on teaching Somaliland’s leaders the mechanics of propaganda and information warfare. Its mission: to train ministers and senior officials to generate a “steady flow of information” and proactively manage the media, in order to counter independent outlets.
It was noted that “unsatisfied public demand for information” from the government “on nationally significant events” gave independent information sources significant influence locally, which was to be countered at all costs.
In Somaliland, public distrust of their government was fueled by frequent arrests of journalists and media shutdowns, so Albany’s role was to consolidate state control over information – ensuring one narrative, “one voice,” no dissent.
An official document reviewed by The Cradle
A prison camp in waiting
While ASI touted its reforms, documents from another contractor – Coffey International – presented a more candid picture. Somaliland’s military, the files noted, was “the largest and most costly institution of state,” yet evaded oversight, with its funds likely diverted for opaque ends. Accountability for military abuses was virtually nonexistent.
The police, meanwhile, had “a history of applying disproportionate force,” and no “dedicated public order unit.” Coffey proposed creating one within the Special Protection Unit – a paramilitary force protecting foreign organizations and their staff. At the time, the unit had no mandate for crowd control or responding to peaceful protests.
That July 2015 document recommended Somaliland police be trained in the UK by the National Police, covering human rights, crowd engagement, and first aid. The aim: instill “proportionality, lawfulness, [and] accountability” throughout Somaliland’s police forces. Yet if this training occurred, it had no visible impact.
In late 2022, mass protests erupted in the contested city of Las Anod. Somaliland forces responded with lethal force, killing dozens. The crackdown escalated, and in 2023, Somaliland’s military indiscriminately shelled the city. Amnesty International described the attack as “indiscriminate,” targeting schools, hospitals, and mosques, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing scores.
This is the context in which Somaliland appeals to Israel and its western patrons: a brutal, British-run security apparatus capable of extinguishing any form of dissent – ergo, the perfect dumping ground for Gazan refugees. If Washington establishes a base to launch strikes on Yemen, Palestinians could also be held hostage – literal human shields – to deter reprisals from the Ansarallah-aligned armed forces.
One can only hope this depraved plan collapses as swiftly as earlier US–Israeli schemes to expel Gazans to Egypt or Jordan.
The real question now is whether Somaliland’s leaders are desperate enough for international recognition to trade their 34 years of independence for total US–UK–Israeli military, political, and security hegemony.
It’s Official: Ukraine Conflict is British ‘Proxy War’
By Kit Klarenberg | April 2, 2025
On March 29th, the New York Times published a landmark investigation exposing how the US was “woven” into Ukraine’s battle with Russia “far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” with Washington almost invariably serving as “the backbone of Ukrainian military operations.” The outlet went so far as to acknowledge the conflict was a “proxy war” – an irrefutable reality hitherto aggressively denied in the mainstream – dubbing it a “rematch” of “Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.”
That the US has since February 2022 supplied Ukraine with extraordinary amounts of weaponry, and been fundamental to the planning of many of Kiev’s military operations large and small, is hardly breaking news. Indeed, elements of this relationship have previously been widely reported, with White House apparatchiks occasionally admitting to Washington’s role. Granular detail on this assistance provided by the New York Times probe is nonetheless unprecedented. For example, a dedicated intelligence fusion centre was secretly created at a vast US military base in Germany.
Dubbed “Task Force Dragon”, it united officials from every major US intelligence agency, and “coalition intelligence officers”, to produce extensive daily targeting information on Russian “battlefield positions, movements and intentions”, to “pinpoint” and “determine the ripest, highest-value targets” for Ukraine to strike using Western-provided weapons. The fusion centre quickly became “the entire back office of the war.” A nameless European intelligence chief was purportedly “taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his NATO counterparts had become” in the conflict’s “kill chain”:
“An early proof of concept was a campaign against one of Russia’s most-feared battle groups, the 58th Combined Arms Army. In mid-2022, using American intelligence and targeting information, the Ukrainians unleashed a rocket barrage at the headquarters of the 58th in the Kherson region, killing generals and staff officers inside. Again and again, the group set up at another location; each time, the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.”
Several other well-known Ukrainian broadsides, such as an October 2022 drone barrage on the port of Sevastopol, are now revealed by the New York Times to have been the handiwork of Task Force Dragon. Meanwhile, the outlet confirmed that each and every HIMARS strike conducted by Kiev was entirely dependent on the US, which supplied coordinates, and advice on “positioning [Kiev’s] launchers and timing their strikes.” Local HIMARS operators also required special electronic key [cards]” to fire the missiles, “which the Americans could deactivate anytime.”
Yet, the investigation’s most striking passages highlight London’s principal role in influencing and managing Ukrainian – and by extension US – actions and strategy in the conflict. Both direct references and unambiguous insinuations littered throughout point ineluctably to the conclusion that the “proxy war” is of British concoction and design. If rapprochement between Moscow and Washington succeeds, it would represent the most spectacular failure to date of Britain’s concerted post-World War II conspiracy to exploit American military might and wealth for its own purposes.
‘Prevailing Wisdom’
A particularly revealing section of the New York Times probe details the execution of Ukraine’s August 2022 counteroffensive, targeting Kharkov and Kherson. Unexpectedly finding limited resistance from hollowed out Russian positions in these areas, Task Force Dragon’s US military lead Lieutenant General Christopher T. Donahue urged Ukraine’s field commander Major General Andrii Kovalchuk to keep pushing, and seize even further territory. He vehemently resisted, despite Donahue and other senior US military officials pressuring then-Ukrainian Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi to override his reticence.
Subsequently, the sense among Kiev’s foreign puppet masters that a golden opportunity to inflict an even more egregious blow on the Russians had been lost was pervasive. Irate, then-British defence minister Ben Wallace asked Donahue what he would do if Kovalchuk were his subordinate. “He would have already been fired,” Donahue said. Wallace succinctly responded, “I got this.” At his direct demand, Kovalchuk was duly defenestrated. As the New York Times explains, the British “had considerable clout” in Kiev and hands-on influence over Ukrainian officials.
This was because, “unlike the Americans,” Britain had formally inserted teams of military officers into the country, to advise Ukrainian officials directly. Still, despite Kiev failing to fully capitalise as desired by London and Washington, the 2022 counteroffensive’s success produced widespread “irrational exuberance”. Planning for a followup the next year thus “began straightaway.” The “prevailing wisdom” within Task Force Dragon was this counteroffensive “would be the war’s last”, with Ukraine claiming “outright triumph”, or Russia being “forced to sue for peace.”
Zelensky boasted internally, “we’re going to win this whole thing.” The plan was for Ukrainian forces to cut off Russia’s land-bridge to Crimea, before seizing the peninsula outright. As the New York Times records though, Pentagon officials were considerably less enthused about Kiev’s prospects. This scepticism seeped out into the public sphere in April 2023 via the Pentagon Leaks. One document warned Ukraine would fall “well short” of its goals in the counteroffensive, forecasting “modest territorial gains” at most.
The leaked intelligence assessment attributed this to “shortfalls” in Ukraine’s “force generation and sustainment”, extensive Russian defences constructed following their retreat from Kherson. It cautioned “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties.” The New York Times notes Pentagon officials moreover “worried about their ability to supply enough weapons for the counteroffensive,” and wondered if the Ukrainians “in their strongest possible position, should consider cutting a deal.”
Even Task Force Dragon’s Lieutenant General Donahue had doubts, advocating “a pause” of a year or more for “building and training new brigades.” Yet, intervention by the British was, per the New York Times, sufficient to neutralise internal opposition to a fresh counteroffensive in the spring. They argued, “if the Ukrainians were going to go anyway, the coalition needed to help them.” Resultantly, enormous quantities of exorbitantly expensive, high-end military equipment were shipped to Kiev by almost every NATO member state for the purpose.
Western-supplied tanks obliterated during Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive
The counteroffensive was finally launched in June 2023. Relentlessly blitzed by artillery and drones from day one, tanks and soldiers were also routinely blown to smithereens by expansive Russian-laid minefields. Within a month, Ukraine had lost 20% of its Western-provided vehicles and armor, with nothing to show for it. When the counteroffensive fizzled out at the end of 2023, just 0.25% of territory occupied by Russia in the initial phase of the invasion had been regained. Meanwhile, Kiev’s casualties may have exceeded 100,000.
‘Knife Edge’
The New York Times reports that “the counteroffensive’s devastating outcome left bruised feelings on both sides,” with Washington and Kiev blaming each other for the catastrophe. A Pentagon official claims “the important relationships were maintained, but it was no longer the inspired and trusting brotherhood of 2022 and early 2023.” Given Britain’s determination to “keep Ukraine fighting at all costs”, this was bleak news indeed, threatening to halt all US support for the proxy war.
Still, there was one last perceived ace up London’s sleeve to keep Washington invested in the proxy conflict, and potentially escalate it into all-out hot war with Moscow. The New York Times reports that in March 2023, the US discovered Kiev “was furtively planning a ground operation into southwest Russia.” The CIA’s Ukraine chief confronted General Kyrylo Budanov, warning “if he crossed into Russia, he would do so without American weapons or intelligence support.” He did so anyway, “only to be forced back.”
Rather than deterring further incursions, Ukraine’s calamitous intervention in Russia’s Bryansk region was a “foreshadowing” of Kiev’s all-out invasion of Kursk on August 6th that year. The New York Times records how from Washington’s perspective, the operation “was a significant breach of trust.” For one, “the Ukrainians had again kept them in the dark” – but worse, “they had secretly crossed a mutually agreed-upon line.” Kiev was using “coalition-supplied equipment” on Russian territory, breaching “rules laid down” when limited strikes inside Russia were greenlit months earlier.
As this journalist has exposed, Ukraine’s Kursk folly was a British invasion in all but name. London was central to its planning, provided the bulk of the equipment deployed, and deliberately advertised its involvement. As The Times reported at the time, the goal was to mark Britain as a formal belligerent in the proxy war, in the hope other Western countries – particularly the US – would follow suit, and “send more equipment and give Kyiv more leeway to use them in Russia.”
Initially, US officials keenly distanced themselves from the Kursk incursion. Empire house journal Foreign Policy reported that the Biden administration was not only enormously unhappy “to have been kept out of the loop,” but “skeptical of the military logic” behind the “counterinvasion”. In a further rebuke, on August 16th Washington prohibited Ukraine’s use of British-made, long-range Storm Shadow missiles against Russian territory. Securing wider Western acquiescence to such strikes was reportedly also a core objective behind Kiev’s occupation of Kursk.
However, once Donald Trump prevailed in the November 2024 presidential election, Biden was encouraged to use his “last, lame-duck weeks” to make “a flurry of moves to stay the course… and shore up his Ukraine project.” In the process, per the New York Times, he “crossed his final red line,” allowing ATACMS and Storm Shadow strikes deep inside Russia, while permitting US military advisers to leave Kiev “for command posts closer to the fighting.”
Fast forward to today, and the Kursk invasion has ended in utter disaster, with the few remaining Ukrainian forces not captured or killed fleeing. Meanwhile, Biden’s flailing, farewell red line breaches have failed to tangibly shift the battlefield balance in Kiev’s favour at all. As the New York Times acknowledges, the proxy war’s continuation “teeters on a knife edge.” There is no knowing what British intelligence might have in store to prevent long-overdue peace prevailing at last, but the consequences could be world-threatening.
British intel sought to silence West’s top Russia academic, leaks reveal
UK intelligence operatives groomed British politicians to silence skeptical academics
By Kit Klarenberg | The Grayzone | April 1, 2025
Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal a high-level British intelligence plot to smear and silence British political scientists such as Richard Sakwa, who is widely regarded as one of the English-speaking world’s foremost authorities on Russia.
In a March 2022 email entitled “Russians in our Universities,” British military intelligence officer and former senior NATO advisor Chris Donnelly accused Sakwa of being a Russian “fellow traveller” who’d been “gradually breaking cover,” insisting the professor was “far too well-informed about Russian strategy to be called just ‘a useful idiot.’” Another email reveals Donnelly fantasizing about publicly exposing Sakwa for being “funded by Russian entities” – a claim the professor strenuously denies.
Donnelly fired off the emails just two weeks after the UK’s then-Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi pledged that the British government was “already on the case and is contacting [their] universities,” after being asked whether the UK government would intervene directly to stop anti-war academics from “acting as useful idiots for President Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine.”
The Grayzone has revealed Donnelly as a key figure behind a secret British military and spying cell dubbed Project Alchemy, which was created in early 2022 to keep Ukraine fighting “at all costs.” A core component of that effort was to silence journalistic voices and media outlets – including this one – deemed a threat to London’s control of the proxy war’s narrative.
The newly-exposed messages show that Donnelly was conducting similar operations in the academic world as well. Though Professor Sakwa has long challenged dominant Western narratives on Putin’s Russia, criticizing both NATO’s rampant expansionism and its refusal to include Moscow in the European security structure following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, he was effectively disappeared from mainstream debates on the conflict since the Ukraine proxy war erupted.
The leaked emails strongly suggest the direct intervention of Donnelly, a known British intelligence asset, may have been responsible for marginalizing Sakwa. Messages show Donnelly contacted influential UK lawmakers to stamp out the “influence” of Sakwa, whom he called his “number one” target, while calling for the blacklisting of other academics who might expose inconvenient truths about the conflict in Ukraine.
Donnelly’s determination to silence the professor apparently extended beyond the duration of the conflict. In private, he fretted that once “fighting slows down” in Ukraine, “appeasers” would “start talking about lifting the sanctions,” and “the Sakwas of this world will be spearheading the effort to change Western strategy.” In other words, even when the war ended in failure for Kiev and its proxy backers, Connelly and his associates would remain determined to prevent any public reconsideration of the West’s relationship with Russia.
Sakwa “a redoubtable opponent” who’s taken “very seriously”
While recently smeared as a Kremlin apologist and “disinformation” peddler in certain quarters, Sakwa’s works have historically elicited glowing mainstream reviews. Even after the Ukraine proxy war erupted, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs journal positively appraised the professor’s recent books dissecting the Russiagate fraud, and the origins of the Ukraine conflict. Clearly, it was Sakwa’s credibility and formidable body of knowledge that made him a target of British intelligence following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
In emails exchanged with James Sherr, a career think tank staffer who once headed the Russia and Eurasia program at the British government-linked think tank Chatham House, Donnelly expressed discomfort about the prospect of Sakwa’s ideas reaching impressionable Western audiences. Sakwa’s “knowledge of Russian politics is very high,” Donnelly warned Sherr, making him “a redoubtable opponent” whom the “majority” of British students and “junior/mid-level politicians” would likely take “very seriously.”
Sherr responded that he had “no doubt” Sakwa was “on the Kremlin payroll,” but insisted the academic criticized NATO expansion “not [for] money,” but “out of hatred of the United States.” If there was “hard evidence” that Sakwa was “funded by Russian entities, then this should be made known,” Sherr added, but even if footage existed of Vladimir Putin personally “writing [Sakwa] a cheque over dinner… the University of Kent will continue to employ him, and he will continue to be adored by those who adore him.”
Donnelly agreed with his friend’s false assessment, but was evidently undeterred from pursuing Sakwa, telling Sherr, “we can try!” He added that Andrew Monaghan, another academic who had long warned of the perils of military confrontation with Russia, hadn’t been heard from “for a while,” and asked Sherr: “who else should we be keeping an eye out for?” A day later, Donnelly posed the same question to his longtime associate Victor Madeira, an academic closely connected to former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove.
This followed another email by Donnelly to Conservative MP Bob Seely, a hawkish military veteran and then-member of parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Donnelly asked Seely whether he was “concerned about Russian influence in our Universities,” because “if so, I’ve got some interesting material for you.” Forwarding the unsolicited email to Madeira, Donnelly boasted, “l may have an opportunity to get this addressed,” and bragged that he would soon be discussing the subject with the then-chair of British Parliament’s education select committee.
“cells in the British governmental apparatus… which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy”
In comments to The Grayzone, Sakwa said Donnelly’s actions were “extremely disturbing,” and suggested the emails indicate “there are cells in the British governmental apparatus who are working in ways which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy, tolerance of divergent political views, and the encouragement of open debate and dialogue.”
The professor argues that “by traducing scholars and civic activists,” Donnelly and his collaborators “precisely undermine the values which they are ostensibly trying to defend,” and “practice guilt by association.”
“The assumption [that] questioning official policy on a particular issue must be motivated by mercenary concerns, in this case being in the pay of Moscow, is a dreadful manifestation of the McCarthyism we had hoped we put behind us with the end of the Cold War,” Sakwa adds.
“In fact, it demonstrates [that] Cold War II is potentially more dangerous than the first, with the attempt to blacken the reputation of critical voices, and thus assumedly weaken their public impact. This is not only morally and politically wrong in itself, but also damages the possibility of coherent, informed and dispassionate analysis, and thus weakens the coherence of intelligent policy-making in its entirety.”
When Sakwa retired from his university position in August 2022, he was unaware that British intelligence operatives had waged a plot to silence him for over a year. Now, however, the professor wonders whether an incident that occurred two months prior may have been related. That June, the Canterbury anti-war movement organized an event at which Sakwa was the guest speaker. “To our astonishment, about 20 Ukrainians and associates picketed the meeting, with banners condemning me and the organizers,” he told The Grayzone.
Rather than being turned away, the protesters were invited in – “minus placards,” Sakwa noted. However, “they then proceeded to try to disrupt the meeting,” until the event chair warned them “that if their anti-democratic behavior continued, they would be asked to leave.” Following the warning, the event continued in peace. Sakwa said “most” attendees felt his address “struck the appropriate balance between sympathy for the plight of the Ukrainian people, and political analysis of the situation.”
The incident likely would have ended there, but counter-demonstrators seized on leaflets calling for an official inquiry into the ever-mysterious Bucha incident which were distributed by another attendee. Ukrainian officials and their British backers charge that Russian forces carried out a massacre of innocent civilians in the city of Bucha, but have blocked attempts at UN investigation, and refused to release names of purported victims.
While Sakwa believes calls for such a probe to be “not unreasonable”, he said he had nothing to do with the leaflets’ production, and was unaware of their contents at the time. He only learned of their existence when one of the Ukrainian activists who disrupted the event accused him of condoning “conspiracy theories,” leading the University of Kent to open an internal inquiry.
“To the University of Kent’s credit, they dismissed any potential charge of misconduct, and defended the principle of freedom of speech. The institution lived up to its reputation for collegiality and the robust defence of academic freedom,” Sakwa says. “However, the initial charge was clearly malicious and malevolent, and demonstrates the danger of ‘Ukraine syndrome’ damaging the quality of civic life in England.”
Today, “Ukraine syndrome” remains alive and well in Britain as Prime Minister Keir Starmer proudly declares his desire to deploy troops and aircraft to Kiev to participate in hostilities despite UK military chiefs warning that London lacks the men and materiel to even consider such a mission. A depressing official review of the British Army has prompted the head of the Financial Times’ editorial board to conclude “their forces would struggle to fight a European war lasting more than a few weeks.”
While Richard Sakwa and other genuine regional experts warned over many years that transforming Ukraine into an anti-Russian bastion would lead to disaster for all involved, Western leaders turned instead to the paranoid pronouncements of spies like Chris Donnelly for guidance on how to respond to Moscow’s forcefully stated opposition to Ukraine joining NATO. And before the belligerent plans of Donnelly and his cadre could be discredited, they made certain that no one would be left to call them out.
Welcome to Britain, Where Critical WhatsApp Messages Are a Police Matter
By Cam Wakefield | Reclaim The Net | March 30, 2025
You’d think that in Britain, the worst thing that could happen to you after sending a few critical WhatsApp messages would be a passive-aggressive reply or, at most, a snooty whisper campaign. What you probably wouldn’t expect is to have six police officers show up on your doorstep like they’re hunting down a cartel. But that’s precisely what happened to Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine — two parents whose great offense was asking some mildly inconvenient questions about how their daughter’s school planned to replace its retiring principal.
This is not an episode of Black Mirror. This is Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, 2025. And the parents in question—Maxie Allen, a Times Radio producer, and Rosalind Levine, 46, a mother of two—had the gall to inquire, via WhatsApp no less, whether Cowley Hill Primary School was being entirely above board in appointing a new principal.
What happened next should make everyone in Britain pause and consider just how overreaching their government has become. Because in the time it takes to send a meme about the school’s bake sale, you too could be staring down the barrel of a “malicious communications” charge.
The trouble started in May, shortly after the school’s principal retired. Instead of the usual round of polite emails, clumsy PowerPoints, and dreary Q&A sessions, there was… silence. Maxie Allen, who had once served as a school governor—so presumably knows his way around a budget meeting—asked the unthinkable: when was the recruitment process going to be opened up?
A fair question, right? Not in Borehamwood, apparently. The school responded not with answers, but with a sort of preemptive nuclear strike. Jackie Spriggs, the chair of governors, issued a public warning about “inflammatory and defamatory” social media posts and hinted at disciplinary action for those who dared to cause “disharmony.” One imagines this word being uttered in the tone of a Bond villain stroking a white cat.
For the crime of “casting aspersions,” Allen and Levine were promptly banned from the school premises. That meant no parents’ evening, no Christmas concert, no chance to speak face-to-face about the specific needs of their daughter Sascha, who—just to add to the bleakness of it all—has epilepsy and is registered disabled.
So what do you do when the school shuts its doors in your face? You send emails. Lots of them. You try to get answers. And if that fails, you might—just might—vent a little on WhatsApp.
But apparently, that was enough to earn the label of harassers. Not in the figurative, overly sensitive, “Karen’s upset again” sense. No, this was the actual, legal, possibly-prison kind of harassment.
Then came January 29. Rosalind was at home sorting toys for charity—presumably a heinous act in today’s climate—when she opened the door to what can only be described as a low-budget reboot of Line of Duty. Six officers. Two cars. A van. All to arrest two middle-aged parents whose biggest vice appears to be stubborn curiosity.
“I saw six police officers standing there,” she said. “My first thought was that Sascha was dead.”
Instead, it was the prelude to an 11-hour ordeal in a police cell. Eleven hours. That’s enough time to commit actual crimes, be tried, be sentenced, and still get home in time for MasterChef.
Allen called the experience “dystopian,” and, for once, the word isn’t hyperbole. “It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,” he said. “We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”
Worse still, they were never even told which communications were being investigated. It’s like being detained by police for “vibes.”
One of the many delightful ironies here is that the school accused them of causing a “nuisance on school property,” despite the fact that neither of them had set foot on said property in six months.
Now, in the school’s defense—such as it is—they claim they went to the police because the sheer volume of correspondence and social media posts had become “upsetting.” Which raises an important question: when did being “upsetting” become a police matter?
What we’re witnessing is not a breakdown in communication, but a full-blown bureaucratic tantrum. Instead of engaging with concerned parents, Cowley Hill’s leadership took the nuclear option: drag them out in cuffs and let the police deal with it.
Hertfordshire Constabulary, apparently mistaking Borehamwood for Basra, decided this was a perfectly normal use of resources. “The number of officers was necessary,” said a spokesman, “to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address.”
Right. Nothing says “childcare” like watching your mom get led away in handcuffs while your toddler hides in the corner, traumatized.
After five weeks—five weeks of real police time, in a country where burglaries are basically a form of inheritance transfer—the whole thing was quietly dropped. Insufficient evidence. No charges. Not even a slap on the wrist.
So here we are. A story about a couple who dared to question how a public school was run, and ended up locked in a cell, banned from the school play, and smeared with criminal accusations for trying to advocate for their disabled child.
This is Britain in 2025. A place where public institutions behave like paranoid cults and the police are deployed like private security firms for anyone with a bruised ego. All while the rest of the population is left wondering how many other WhatsApp groups are one message away from a dawn raid.
Because if this is what happens when you ask a few inconvenient questions, what’s next? Fingerprinting people for liking the wrong Facebook post? Tactical units sent in for sarcastic TripAdvisor reviews?
It’s a warning. Ask the wrong question, speak out of turn, and you too may get a visit from half the local police force.
EU ‘preparing for war’ – Hungarian FM
RT | March 29, 2025
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has accused Brussels bureaucrats of clinging to a “failed pro-war policy” in a desperate attempt to delay the moment when European taxpayers begin asking where the money spent on bankrolling Kiev has gone.
The European Union recently advised its 450 million inhabitants to stockpile essential supplies for at least 72 hours, with EU Commissioner for Crisis Management Hadja Lahbib warning on Wednesday that the Ukraine conflict threatens the bloc’s overall security.
Szijjarto said he initially thought the warning was some kind of joke or “trolling,” after Lahbib posted a bizarre video showing Europeans what to pack in a 72-hour survival kit.
“But why, in the 21st century, should EU citizens prepare a survival kit? There’s only one explanation: Brussels is preparing for war,“ Szijjarto wrote in a post on X on Friday. “At a time when there’s finally a real chance for a ceasefire and meaningful peace talks with [President Donald Trump’s] return to office, Brussels is going in the opposite direction, clinging to a failed pro-war policy.”
“Why? Because as long as the war continues, pro-war European politicians can avoid taking responsibility for three years of failure, and avoid answering an extremely uncomfortable question: where is the money that was sent to Ukraine?”
EU institutions in Brussels and individual member states have spent over €132 billion over the past three years supporting Kiev, and have pledged an additional €115 billion that has yet to be allocated, according to data from Germany’s Kiel Institute.
Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has pushed for a diplomatic resolution and sought to recoup what he estimates to be over $300 billion in US taxpayer money that his predecessor “gifted” to Kiev. Washington recently brokered a limited ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, placing a moratorium on attacks on energy infrastructure. Kiev, however, has repeatedly breached the ceasefire terms, according to Moscow.
Despite the ongoing peace process, the EU has continued to push a hawkish agenda. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently unveiled an €800 billion plan to ramp up military spending through loans.
Meanwhile, France and the UK continue to advocate for the deployment of a military contingent to Ukraine. Speaking after a summit in Paris on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that a so-called “coalition of the willing” will seek to deploy a “reassurance force” to Ukraine after a peace deal with Russia is reached.
The proposal to send troops has already been rejected by several EU members. The “coalition of the willing” – a phrase originally coined by the US in 2003 to describe countries backing the invasion of Iraq – now mostly refers to states that have pledged to continue supporting Kiev militarily, without necessarily committing to troop deployments.
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The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – 10th part of the series “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 9, 2016
… In Among The Truthers Kay repeats the core idea of The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad. As Kay would have it, 9/11 confirms the role of Israel as the West’s primary bulwark against Islamic savagery. In making this case Kay repeats the assertion of Benjamin Netanyahu that 9/11 was good for Israel.
Kay asserts, “Following the attacks supporters of Israel spoke of a silver lining. The war against militant Islam suddenly was a global one. Now the whole world would see and understand the sort of nihilistic hatred that Israelis confront every day.” As Kay sees it, Jews are being enlisted en masse to serve as primary soldiers in a war of civilizations.
He writes, “The Jew was the perfect anti-Islamist, whose zeal and reliability was hard-wired into his political DNA thanks to six decades of Israeli warfare against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.” … Read full article
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