Two fall critically ill near UK nerve poisoning town
AMESBURY, United Kingdom: Two people are in hospital in critical condition after exposure to an ‘unknown substance’ in the same British town where a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent earlier this year, officials said yesterday.
Counter-terrorism police, who the led the investigation into the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, said they were assisting local police in the investigation which has been declared a ‘major incident’ by the emergency services.
Scientists at Britain’s defence laboratory at Porton Down are carrying out tests to try and establish if there is any connection between the two incidents, British media reported.
The couple, a man and a woman in their 40s, were discovered unconscious at a house in a quiet, newly- built area in Amesbury, a village near the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge.
Amesbury is about 12 kilometres from Salisbury, where the Skripals were found slumped on a bench in March in an incident that sparked a bitter diplomatic crisis with Russia.
The two patients “are both currently receiving treatment for suspected exposure to an unknown substance at Salisbury District Hospital,” a police statement said.
“They are both in a critical condition.” The hospital is the same one where the Skripals were treated.
The pair were found on Saturday with police saying they initially suspected that they had fallen ill after using “heroin or crack cocaine from a contaminated batch of drugs.”
“However, further testing is now ongoing to establish the substance which led to these patients becoming ill and we are keeping an open mind as to the circumstances surrounding this incident.” Security cordons have been set up around the areas where the pair went before they fell ill with security boosted in both Amesbury and Salisbury.
A spokesman for Public Health England ( PHE) said “it is not believed that there is a significant health risk to the wider public.” “This will be continually assessed as further information becomes known,” he said.
Wiltshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson said police had worked hard to contain “any risk that might be there”, the BBC reported.
Macpherson said there was “no reason to think it’s connected” to the Skripal case.