Critically ill man could be former Russian spy
Q Who are the couple found unconscious and in critical condition on a bench in a shopping centre in Salisbury, west of London?
A Authorities aren’t saying, but British media identified him as former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, 66, who was convicted in Russia of spying for Britain. The woman appeared to be in her 30s and has not yet been publicly identified. Q What do police think happened to them?
A It is thought the pair may have been exposed to the synthetic drug Fentanyl, which is up to 10,000 times more powerful than heroin and has been linked to scores of deaths. Eyewitness Freya Church told the BBC it looked like they had taken “something quite strong.” The woman appeared to have passed out, Church said. “He was doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky,” she said.
Q Do police suspect a crime?
A They declared a major incident and said a number of areas of the city had been cordoned off while they investigated. The incident has uncomfortable echoes of the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a dissident Russian ex-spy who was murdered in 2006 after having his tea spiked with radioactive polonium. In 2016 a judge ruled that President Vladimir Putin probably approved the murder. Russia dismissed the U.K. inquiry at the time as a “politicized farce.” Q What exactly did Skripal do that may have incited Russia’s wrath?
A He was a senior Russian intelligence official who was jailed in Moscow in 2006 for passing on the identities of Russian secret agents operating throughout Europe to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). At his trial in Moscow’s military court, prosecutors claimed he had been spying for Britain since the 1990s and had taken tens of thousands of dollars in payments from MI6 agents for information. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 13 years in prison. But after just four years, he was pardoned by then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, and took part in a major spy swap deal, which saw four Russian prisoners released in exchange for 10 spies being held by the FBI.