Ex-Russian spy and pal slumped near Superdrug
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A FORMER Russian spy given refuge in Britain was fighting for his life last night after being found “poisoned” in a shopping centre.
Ex-MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and an unnamed woman, 33, both collapsed and were taken to hospital where they were both critically ill.
Emergency services had been called to The Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury, Wilts.
Freya Church, who saw the couple slumped on a bench told how they “looked so out of it” as if they were drugged.
She said: “She was sort of leant in on him, it looked like she had passed out. He was doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky.”
A specialist chemical response team then removed the substance from the area outside branches of Greggs and Superdrug.
Prison
The substance may be a synthetic opiate up to 100 times more potent than heroin, one local source speculated.
Mr Skripal is a retired Russian military intelligence colonel nicknamed “the spy with the Louis Vuitton bag”.
In 2006, he was convicted at a Moscow military court of passing Russian secrets to British spooks at MI6 and was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Four years later he was granted refuge in the UK after a spy swap between the US and Russia in 2010. Mr Skripal was swapped for glamorous spy Anna Chapman.
He settled in Salisbury with his wife Liudmila who passed away six years ago.
A police spokesman said: “Wiltshire Police have declared a major incident. A man and a woman are currently in a critical condition.”
An incident response team was called to decontaminate the A&E department at Salisbury District Hospital which was shut down for a period. The incident happened 12 years after Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was killed.
He died in agony after two Russian agents slipped radioactive polonium 210 into his tea at a Mayfair hotel in central London.
The killing had “probably” been approved by Russian president Vladimir Putin, a public inquiry heard.