Riddle of the ‘missing four hours’ is key to solving poison plot
THE mystery of the Salisbury poisoning deepened last night as police admitted they do not know where the Russian spy and his daughter were for four crucial hours.
A fortnight on from the nerve agent attack that shocked the world, dozens of detectives are still trying to establish the movements of Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia before they were discovered collapsed on a bench.
Scotland Yard issued the first clear photograph of the former double agent’s car, a burgundy BMW, and asked for the public’s help in working out where it was between 9.15am and 1.30pm on Sunday, March 4.
Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, Britain’s counter-terrorism chief, said: ‘We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia’s movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia’s movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre.’
About 250 specialist counterterror officers are working on the case and have taken statements from 400 witnesses, recovered 762 exhibits and trawled through 4,000 hours of CCTV footage. A timeline produced by the Met shows that they know Skripal’s daughter arrived at Heathrow on a flight from Russia at 2.40pm on Saturday, the day before the attack.
One theory is that the nerve agent Novichok was somehow hidden in her luggage by a hit squad acting on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, so that it would strike Skripal when his daughter unpacked.
At 9.15am the following day, Skripal’s car was seen on London Road in the north of Salisbury, as the pair visited the cemetery where his wife Liudmila is buried.
Another possibility is that the deadly substance was added to a bouquet of flowers he left at the graveside. That site is now being pored over by forensic experts.
But the car was not seen again until 1.30pm when it was driven along Devizes Road – not far from Skripal’s home – towards the town centre. Police do not know where Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter were in the intervening hours – and so do not know if it was then that they were exposed to the nerve agent.
From 1.30pm onwards, there is more evidence about their location.
They left the BMW at the Sainsbury’s car park in the Maltings shopping centre at 1.40pm, went to the Bishops Mill pub in the town centre and arrived at the Zizzi restaurant at 2.20pm.
They left at 3.35pm and it was at 4.15pm when emergency services were called after a member of the public saw them slumped on a bench in the mall and having convulsions. Yulia and her father – a military intelligence officer in Russia who was jailed for selling secrets to MI6 but who moved to Britain after being freed in a Cold War-style spy swap – remain in a critical but stable condition in Salisbury District Hospital. However, Sergeant Nick Bailey, one of the first policemen who attended to them and who was also exposed to the nerve agent, is no longer in a critical condition.
Lorna Wilkinson, director of nursing at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, said: ‘The news about the improvement in Sergeant Bailey’s health is very welcome.
‘I want to thank all our staff who have been working tirelessly to give outstanding care to him, as they do with all our patients.’
Was agent hidden in luggage by a hit squad? Officers have trawled 4,000 hours of footage