KREMLIN KILLERS
Stabbed repeatedly with two knives — but ruled a suicide. After the Salisbury attack, a chilling new question...
laid the blame firmly at Russia’s door.
They would not say when the evidence of Russia testing Novichok on door handles had come to light for security reasons – confirming only that the details had been unearthed in ‘recent times’.
A source said this key evidence had been handed over to Britain’s allies in a move described as unprecedented intelligence sharing.
The UK’s allies gave their full backing to Britain over the poisoning after they were given top-secret briefings.
Last month police disclosed that they believed a Russian hit squad had poisoned Mr Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia by smearing a nerve agent on their front door.
Counter-terror officers said they thought the Skripals ‘first came into contact’ with Novichok at their home.
Scotland Yard said the ‘highest concentration of the nerve agent’ had been discovered on the front door of the house.
In an interview last month, Boris Johnson said the UK had evidence that Russia had been exploring nerve agentbased assassinations. The Foreign Secretary also said Moscow had been stockpiling deadly chemical weapons in the past decade and Britain had reason to believe Russia had collected the ‘military grade’ Novichok used in Salisbury.
Yesterday the Mail revealed how intelligence agents were investigating a Russian who had been on the same flight into the UK as Miss Skripal – before returning to Moscow a few hours later. Spy agencies red-
‘An assassination weapon’
flagged an individual who arrived at Heathrow on the Russian state-owned Aeroflot flight AFL2570 from Moscow that landed at 2.32pm on Saturday, March 3. The Skripals were hospitalised on March 4.
A Whitehall source said they had been identified as a ‘person of interest’ by intelligence agencies, and pointed to more than one person being investigated.
It is not clear whether the person is suspected of delivering the agent, administering the Novichok, or of being linked to the attack in some other way.
Secret site is ‘the graveyard of the Earth’ ‘He stopped caring about anything’
WHEn the body of 46- year- old Dr Matthew Puncher was found at his Oxfordshire home two years ago, the brilliant scientist had suffered multiple wounds to his neck, arm and stomach.
There was blood everywhere — pooling under his body and covering the kitchen floor. A kitchen knife was in his hand. A smaller knife, also blood- stained, was in the sink several yards away.
Indeed, so horrific were his wounds that police initially believed he had been murdered, with one investigating officer stating that she ‘didn’t know how he could have inflicted them on himself without falling unconscious’.
As a result, police at the scene searched for evidence of a break-in or a struggle with a knife- wielding assailant, possibly during an attempted robbery. But they found ‘ no evidence’ of any third-party involvement, and an inquest later concluded Dr Puncher’s death had been suicide.
And that would have been that except the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter with a nerve agent in Salisbury has reminded the world that, before he died, Dr Puncher found himself caught up in one of the most dangerous and troubling murder investigations Britain has seen.
As an expert in a small, highly specialised field, he had been called in by police in 2006 after a Russian defector was struck down by a strange illness in which his hair fell out and his organs failed.
Initially, British spies thought the victim — former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko — had poisoned himself. His British handlers wondered whether he had deliberately made himself ill to make him seem more important than he was.
But when his condition deteriorated, experts were brought in to identify what mysterious substance could be to blame.
One of these experts was Dr Puncher, a specialist in ‘radiation protection dosimetry’: in layman’s terms, measuring the doses of harmful radiation in humans.
Married with two children, Puncher lived in a red brick home in a quiet cul-de-sac in the village of Drayton, near Abingdon, in Oxfordshire. He worked nearby, at the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, while nights were spent helping his sons with their homework. ‘He loved it,’ his wife Kathryn later told an inquest.
But when he was brought in to examine Litvinenko, who was slipping towards death at a London hospital, Puncher was thrust into the world of murder and international espionage.
The dying Russian showed no sign of radiation when tested for gamma rays, leaving his doctors baffled. After he died in agony three weeks after falling ill, tests Dr Puncher carried out on the body revealed the other experts had been looking for the wrong substance. Unusually, the victim had been exposed to high levels of alpha radiation, a rare type no one else had thought to look for.
Dr Puncher soon identified the substance to blame, setting off a chain of events that continue to reverberate to this day. He and a colleague calculated the amount of polonium210 found inside Alexander Litvinenko’s body — thought to be more than ten times the lethal dose of the poison.
This discovery pointed in one direction: Moscow.
As a result of his breakthrough, police were able to trace a trail of polonium from London’s Millennium Hotel, where the defector was poisoned with a cup of tea, to an aircraft the two hitmen who killed him used to flee back to Russia, where they were given a heroes’ welcome.
This triggered a diplomatic row between Russia and Britain, with a 2016 official inquiry — using evidence gathered by Puncher and his team of experts — eventually finding that the orders for the ‘ hit’ probably came directly from President Vladimir Putin.
So could Dr Puncher’s breakthrough in exposing how Russia murdered Litvinenko have cost him his life?
The shocking circumstances of his death — this affable, kindly scientist who supposedly stabbed himself to death, using two separate knives — are now being probed by British security services investigating a series of murky incidents.
As the diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia worsened after the attack in Salisbury, Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced the deaths of Dr Puncher and 13 others with links to the Russians are to be ‘reviewed’.
Those deaths featured in an investigation by the news website BuzzFeed, which reported that U.S. intelligence officers believed several of them could be blamed on Russia. no wonder some of the late Dr Puncher’s friends and eminent colleagues told me they had concerns about the manner of his death.
Professor Phil Blower, an expert in nuclear medicine at King’s College London, oversaw Puncher’s PhD some 24 years ago and the pair became friends.
‘It just seems so strange that his death hasn’t been investigated further,’ he told me. ‘I’m glad that people are now starting to pay attention. It all seems very odd.’
In its investigation, BuzzFeed news — in an article headlined The Man Who Knew Too Much — revealed that the scientist’s strange, brutal ‘suicide’ was believed by U.S. intelligence to have been a professional assassination.
What is particularly troubling, I have learned, is that just months before he apparently took his own life, in May 2016, the scientist had returned from a working trip to Russia a changed man.
In 2014, he had been placed in charge of a contract with the U.S. government to measure levels of radiation at a secret Russian nuclear base in the Ural Mountains.
The Mayak nuclear facility he travelled to is a place so secretive that until recently it was not even on the map. Buried deep in the forests of the Urals, and surrounded by a 150-mile exclusion zone, it is home to the country’s most closely guarded nuclear secrets.
This was the birthplace of the Soviet atomic bomb project, and the site of a series of devastating nuclear disasters that were covered up for decades until the collapse of the USSR. It is one of the most contaminated places on the planet, known by some as ‘the graveyard of the Earth’.
When Dr Puncher travelled to Russia in the final weeks of the Litvinenko inquiry, he was placed in charge of a sensitive assignment — codenamed Project 2.4 — to measure the effects on workers of radiation produced at the Mayak facility. nuclear spills had caused widespread sickness, mutations, cancer and radiation poisoning among nearby residents, and the facility had accepted America’s help in improving safety at the site.
Puncher’s assignment was part of a U.S. federal contract given to Public Health England, the government agency charged with guarding British public from health hazards including chemical and nuclear exposure.
Under the U.S. research contract, Puncher and his team were tasked with working on software programs designed to measure the risks of radiation exposure at Mayak.
Yet while they were there, they were ‘ followed and bugged’ by Russian spies, according to Dr Alan Birchall, a colleague who accompanied Puncher on these trips. It proved to be an unhappy project to work on.
After coming home from one of these assignments, Puncher told colleagues he believed his brain ‘ was not working properly’. He also confided he feared he was suffering from some sort of nervous breakdown, and had been having suicidal thoughts.
Kathryn, his wife of 16 years, said at her husband’s inquest that his mood ‘completely changed’ after a visit to Russia just before Christmas in 2015. ‘ He was always an upbeat, sensitive man. He was brilliant with the children because he was so intelligent and enjoyed helping them with their homework.’
But over Christmas, her
husband’s mood worsened. He just ‘lost interest’ and his wife had to prompt him to do things like get dressed, cook and wash up, things he had previously done without thinking. ‘He seemed to stop caring about anything,’ she added.
The scientist had, apparently, become obsessed that he may have made an error in his work in Russia, which, although he corrected it in an addendum to a paper he had written, he feared would ruin his reputation.
A former senior Scotland Yard counter-terror officer who spoke to BuzzFeed News said Puncher’s sudden change of mood should not necessarily have convinced police he had killed himself. ‘The [Russian] state can mess up minds; it can do all sorts of things. It has research laboratories, it has science facilities,’ he said. ‘There are all sorts of drugs that can be given to people to create depression.’
He said the proximity of Puncher’s changes of mood to his trips to Russia was potentially ‘very serious and should be investigated fully’. And he said the local Thames Valley Police were in no way equipped to carry out the task.
It should, he said, have been taken over by Scotland Yard’s counter-terror team — who have the security clearance needed to communicate with Britain’s spy agencies in case they have any intelligence that might be relevant to solving a case.
At Dr Puncher’s inquest, in November 2016, Oxfordshire coroner Nicholas Graham was told he had been subjected to a heavy workload as a result of redundancies and restructuring at Public Health England, and was also concerned about the error in his report.
His colleague George Etherington described as ‘irrational’ concerns Dr Puncher had voiced that his ‘miscalculation’ of the effects of the radiation on workers would land him prison. Etherington said in a statement: ‘In February 2016, he attended a meeting in Russia and when he returned he appeared to be quiet and more confined, and people told me mistakes made in mathematical analysis came to light during this meeting. On April 27, I could see Matt was stressed and he said he had made a mistake and he thought he could be prosecuted for not meeting the contractual commitment.
‘He said it was having an effect on his marriage, but said his wife was very supportive, but he had been having thoughts of suicide. I told him his fears were groundless and he would look back and wonder why he worried so much.’
The coroner ultimately recorded a verdict of suicide.
On top of the concerns over the way Dr Puncher died, there is a bizarre twist to this story: the Home Office pathologist who carried out Dr Puncher’s post-mortem — and declared the knife wounds were a result of suicide — was none other than Dr Nicholas Hunt.
He, as keen followers of these matters will recall, is the same Home Office pathologist who ruled that Dr David Kel l y, the government chemical warfare expert and former UN nuclear weapons inspector, had committed suicide in May 2003.
It emerged that Dr Kelly had been the source for a report by BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan that claimed the Blair government knew a claim Saddam Hussein could ready missiles within 45 minutes was false. Dr Kelly’s body was found in a tree circle atop Harrowdown Hill in July 2003, only ten miles from where Dr Puncher’s blood-soaked body was found.
He had taken painkillers and tried to sever his left wrist using a pruning knife. Yet he left no suicide note and had arranged to see his daughter later that day. The case files have been locked away for 70 years. Dr Kelly was buried at a local churchyard, but his body was exhumed in 2017 and then cremated, leading to claims by campaigners that his remains were burned to prevent further tests.
Just as in the case of Matthew Puncher, colleagues of David Kelly doubt he committed suicide. They launched a legal action calling for a full judicial review into his death, saying he could not possibly have killed himself using such a small knife, which caused minimal damage to his arteries.
For now, all eyes are on the battle for survival of the Russian father and daughter poisoned in Salisbury — last week, it was reported that Yulia Skripal was conscious and talking, but her father remains in a stable, critical condition.
Perhaps the case of Dr Puncher — and the others who died in strange circumstances on British soil — will yield more clues about Russian espionage here.
But as one intelligence expert remarked to me sardonically, even if it is ever proved that Russia somehow had a hand in Matthew Puncher’s death: ‘It would make no difference. What are we going to do — start World War III?’
‘The Russian state can mess up minds’