Salisbury park becomes centre of police nerve gas hunt

POLICE are trawling through 1,300 hours of CCTV footage to establish whereacoupleencounteredadiscarded nerve agent as the investigation focused on a Salisbury park and their homes.

Dawn Sturgess, 44, and her partner, Charlie Rowley, 45, remain in critical condition in hospital after being taken ill last weekend when they “handled a contaminated item” in Wiltshire.

New details of the pair’s earlier movements suggest they went to a Salisbury town centre charity shop to buy a picnic blanket before visiting the Queen Elizabeth Gardens nearby.

Counter-terrorism police are understood to have concentrated their search in the cordoned-off park, raising the prospect that it was there that the couple found the agent, perhaps in a discarded vial. They may have then returned with the poison, unaware of the threat it posed, to the nearby assisted-living accommodation where Ms Sturgess lives. That property remained sealed off yesterday as police searched the area and forensics officers took swabs from the building’s exterior.

There was intense police activity 20 miles away at Mr Rowley’s apartment in Amesbury, too, where it is believed the couple returned to sleep after leaving Salisbury by bus around 10.30pm.

Officers have been working on the basis that the poison had been discarded shortly after Sergei and Yulia Skripal were targeted in March.

A police officer has been given the all-clear after fears he had been exposed to Novichok in the wake of the poisonings in Salisbury. The officer, believed to be from Wiltshire Constabulary, underwent tests at Salisbury Hospital after initially being admitted to Great Western Hospital in Swindon.