Army moves in as spy case widens
Almost 200 members of the armed forces arrived on the streets of Salisbury yesterday to support police investigating the nerve agent attack on a Russian former spy and his daughter, as attention focused on the cemetery where the remains of Sergei Skripal’s wife and and son lie.
In extraordinary scenes at the city’s London Rd cemetery that indicated the investigation was gathering pace, experts in full hazmat suits helped set up tents over the grave of Liudmila Skripal and the memorial of Alexander Skripal, who both died in recent years.
Across the city, soldiers, bomb disposal specialists, marines and RAF personnel were called in to help secure vehicles and scenes that may have been contaminated and to help take the pressure off the police. The new deployment included experts in chemical warfare.
The Metropolitan police dismissed reports that an exhumation took place yesterday but would not discuss why there was a flurry of activity at the cemetery.
According to Liudmila’s death certificate, she died of cancer in 2012 aged 59, while Alexander died in March last year in St Petersburg, aged 43, in unknown circumstances. He was cremated.
Most attention seemed to be being paid to the site of his memorial stone, which is topped by a model of a St Bernard dog.
Earlier, a convoy of military lorries accompanied by police escorts, incident response units and an ambulance arrived at Salisbury district hospital, where Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, remain critically ill.
They removed a police car that is believed to have been used in the response to the attack.
One of the officers involved in the early response to the collapse of father and daughter, DS Nick Bailey, remained seriously ill in the same hospital. It has emerged that he visited the Salisbury home of Skripal after the pair were found slumped on a bench in the city centre.
Investigators want to know whether Bailey visited the scene where the two Russians were found and was poisoned there or by items there, or whether the officer was contaminated on his visit to Skripal’s home.
Sources say that, while it is not certain, it is believed more likely that Bailey became contaminated on his visit to the home.
The Met commissioner, Cressida Dick, paid tribute to Bailey, his colleagues and other emergency services.
She said: ‘‘It’s a very challenging investigation. It’s obviously a very challenging environment to work in. And I guess these very vivid images that people are seeing just reminds people of what our first responders, what our forensics people, what our investigators do and may find themselves doing, and the professionalism and courage that takes.’’
Dick declined to comment when asked about the former Met commissioner Lord Blair backing calls for 14 other deaths to be reexamined after the Salisbury incident.
With suspicion falling on the Russian state, Theresa May’s government is understood to have a menu of options for responding to the attack. May is said to be determined to be tougher than the UK was following the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Options include expelling diplomats, revision of sanctions, not officially sending a minister to the football World Cup, designating Russia as a state sponsor of terror – and even, though this is believed to be unlikely, declassifying intelligence implicating Vladimir Putin.
The thinking in Westminster is understood to be that the UK has few benefits from good relations with Putin and the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson’s visit to
Moscow was not deemed a success.
During a visit to Salisbury, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, described the attack as ‘‘outrageous’’.
She said: ‘‘I understand people’s curiosity about all those questions, wanting to have answers, and there will be a time to have those answers. But the best way to get to them is to make sure we give the police the space they need to really go through the area carefully, to do their investigation and to make sure that they have all the support that they need in order to get that.’’
Rudd added: ‘‘In terms of further options, that will have to wait until we’re absolutely clear what the consequences could be and what the actual source of this nerve agent has been.’’
She said the responders to the incident had told her that something about the scene, which police initially believed to be drugs related, ‘‘didn’t feel quite right’’.
‘‘It didn’t stop them for a minute from doing the right thing, making sure that precautions were immediately taken to protect the victims and making sure they secured the site in a professional way,’’ Rudd said.
Among the troops in Salisbury were experts in surveillance from the Royal Tank Regiment, Royal Marines from 40 Commando and members of the RAF Regiment.
Chemical warfare instructors were on the ground as well as bomb disposal experts from 29 Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Search Group.
The use of a nerve toxin is seen as a key indicator of possible Kremlin involvement, with such substances usually held only in state military stockpiles.
Moscow has repeatedly denied it had anything to do with the attack, the same line used when Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in his cup of tea. A public inquiry a decade later concluded that the Kremlin ordered the killing.
Meanwhile, the Russian embassy tweeted: ‘‘Investigation of Sergei Skripal case follows the Litvinenko script: most info to be classified, Russia to get no access to investigation files and no opportunity to assess its credibility.’’