Poison case may be linked to Putin

Russian double agent found ‘out cold’ on bench in English mall

A FORMER Russian colonel who spied for the UK is in a critical condition in hospital after being exposed to an unknown substance in the English city of Salisbury.

Sergei Skripal, who was given refuge in the UK after being jailed in his home country for treason, was found unconscious on a bench alongside a woman in a shopping centre.

The cause of their illness has not been confirmed but the case has drawn comparison to the murder of former Russian Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko.

He died three weeks after being given radioactive polonium-210 in a cup of tea.

Investigators are understood to be reviewing the death of Mr Litvinenkno to see what similarities there are between that case and this incident.

Police confirmed a man in his 60s and a woman in her 30s did not have any visible injuries when taken to hospital on Sunday afternoon local time. The female was not named. Specialists are working to establish what caused them to fall unconscious. Areas of The Maltings shopping centre and hospital have been closed for decontamination.

A colonel in Russian military intelligence until at least 1999, Mr Skripal was arrested in 2004 on suspicion of spying for the British.

Eventually he admitted to high treason for working for MI6 and providing the identities of active agents in Europe in exchange for payments totalling more than $A125,000.

His conviction was considered a major coup for Russia’s security services, who likened him to a “super spy”.

In 2006, Mr Skripal was convicted in a military court and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He was released early, in 2010 in a high-profile spy swap with Russian sleeper agents uncovered in the US.

The Kremlin has been implicated in several murders carried out on British soil, with Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov killed by a poison pellet fired from an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in 1978.

A public inquiry named Russians Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun as the prime suspects for poisoning Mr Litvinenko at a Mayfair hotel in 2006 but extraditing Russians from Russia is banned by that country’s Constitution.

In a statement dictated from his deathbed, Mr Litvinenko accused Vladimir Putin of ordering his death and a UK inquiry concluded the Russian President had most likely approved the murder after years of “antagonism”.

Inquiry head Sir Robert Owen wrote in 2016: “Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me I find that the FSB operation to kill Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr (Nikolai) Patrushev (director of the security service) and also by President Putin.

“In the years prior to Litvinenko’s death the Russian state may have been involved in the assassination of Mr Putin’s critics.”