BRITAIN KNOWS WHY RUSSIA PUT ITS KILLER SPIES ON TV

U.K. ATTACK

LONDON • The Russian secret services are in crisis over the fallout from the “botched” chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, British intelligence officers believe.

The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, is being accused by rival agencies of “crossing the line” over the way the attempted killing of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia was carried out, senior Whitehall sources claimed Saturday.

British officials told The Telegraph they believe the two suspects accused by Scotland Yard of the attack were wheeled out on Russian state-sponsored television as punishment for leaving a trail of evidence during the operation to target Skripal.

This included numerous sightings of them on CCTV walking around Salisbury in broad daylight, using public transport and carelessly discarding the bottle containing Novichok in a park, leading to the death of Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old Salisbury woman, in July.

A Whitehall source said: “It’s a line of inquiry — that there’s an internal Russian (dispute) that ‘that agency has crossed the line, let’s throw the guys under the bus.’ ”

Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov gave an implausible account of their actions on RT television, claiming they had travelled to the city as tourists to visit the “beautiful” cathedral and its ancient clock.

That suggests the painstaking British police investigation, coupled with a firm diplomatic response by the U.K. government and its allies, may have put the Russian state on the back foot.

The Whitehall source said: “We’ve been proactive in calling out what the Russians are doing. We’ve got a lot better at countering Russian comms activity. Previously they could get away with plausible deniability, in this case it’s not at all plausible, it’s implausible deniability. That’s pretty much down to working across government: police, intelligence agencies working with us both on the case and also how we’ve communicated that.”

Boshirov and Petrov made their much ridiculed TV appearance after Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, publicly called on them to speak to the media, leaving them with little choice but to take part in the stage-managed interview.

They claimed friends had urged them to see the cathedral’s “famous 123-metre spire,” but that the snow and “muddy slush” meant their first trip to Salisbury was less than an hour because of train delays, forcing them to return the next day.

Boshirov and Petrov also denied taking a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume to carry the deadly Novichok poison with them to the U.K.