Russia was hacking Skripal’s daughter

Classified evidence file on Salisbury attacks released to quell ‘disinformation’ campaign from Moscow

RUSSIAN agents hacked Yulia Skripal’s emails for at least five years before she and her father Sergei were poisoned in Salisbury, declassified Government intelligence has revealed.

Specialists from the GRU – Moscow’s Main Intelligence Directorate – targeted email accounts belonging to Miss Skripal as long ago as 2013, and possibly before that, according to the security services, in an apparent attempt to track the Skripals’ movements.

Theresa May took the highly unusual decision to release classified intelligence in order to quash weeks of Russian “disinformation” about the source of the attack.

The dossier also said Russian agents tested the effectiveness of the Novichok nerve agent when it was smeared on door handles as part of a secret chemical weapons programme codenamed Foliant in which Vladimir Putin was “closely involved”.

Police investigating the attempted murder of Miss Skripal and her doubleagent father, Sergei, have previously said that the highest concentrations of Novichok were found on Col Skripal’s front door, suggesting that was where the nerve agent had been deposited.

The details were revealed in a letter from Sir Mark Sedwill, the Prime Minister’s national security adviser, to Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, which was released yesterday by Downing Street. It followed days of delicate negotiations between ministers and intelligence chiefs about what could be put into the public domain.

Russia has offered more than 20 alternative theories for who tried to kill the Skripals, and sources said intelligence chiefs accept that the UK is in a “different type of conflict” in which social media and “persistent disinformation” are used as weapons.

Downing Street insisted the timing of the release was unrelated to events in Syria, where the world has been expecting a reaction from the West to a chemical weapons attack near Damascus last week.

A Government source said: “The Prime Minister certainly holds the view that the use of chemical weapons in any circumstance is abhorrent, and that goes for both Syria and Salisbury.”

The letter makes it clear that the Kremlin views defectors as “legitimate targets for assassination” and raises the possibility that the attempted murder

of the Skripals was the culmination of years of planning by Russian agents.

Investigators believe Miss Skripal’s emails were monitored to check on the movements of her and her father, possibly as part of an earlier plot to plant a nerve agent in her luggage.

The report was made public minutes before Alexander Yakovenko, Russia’s ambassador to London, accused Britain of destroying evidence from the Salisbury attack, having said Britain had “abducted” the Skripals.

Sir Mark says the Novichok was most likely to have been made at a laboratory in Shikhany, near Volgograd, which is a branch of the State Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology. The origins of the nerve agent have been a source of intense speculation and the Government’s failure to specify exactly where it came from has been used by critics to question the decision to blame Russia.