Salisbury assassins were part of secret ‘anti-european’ unit

THE Salisbury nerve agent attackers were working for a top-secret Russian intelligence unit briefed with destabilising Europe, a new report claims.

The team within the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, has also been linked to the attempted poisoning of Emelian Gebrev, a Bulgarian arms dealer, in 2015 and a failed coup attempt in Montenegro in 2016, The New York Times reported citing intelligence officials from four countries.

All three attacks have been linked to the GRU, but they have never before been attributed to a single unit within the agency.

The paper said members had also been linked to a campaign to destabilise Moldova, but did not give further details. Unit 29155, named after the military postcode for a base in northeast Moscow, is possibly so secret that its existence is unknown to other GRU staff.

It appears to be comprised of veteran soldiers who have served in some of Russia and the Soviet Union’s bloodiest wars, such as Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Ukraine. They include Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, the alleged GRU officers Britain has charged with the April 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who became a spy for MI6.

The attack using the Novichok nerve agent failed to kill Mr Skripal, but left him, his daughter, a policeman who attended the scene, and one local man seriously ill. A local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died following the attack.

The only official record of the division on the internet appears to be a 2012 directive from Russia’s ministry of defence that granted bonuses to three military units for “special achievements in military service”.

What appears to have been the unit’s top-secret Moscow base first came to light when a Russian blogger looking for an entrance to Metro-2, a semimythical top-secret railway underneath Moscow, posted photographs from inside an abandoned cottage in the city’s north-east in 2016.

The pictures show a derelict interior, but with labels in cabinets referring to storage places for a large variety of weapons including assault and sniper rifles.