Skripal probe looks at ‘spy in bag’ link

POLICE are probing links between “spy in the bag” victim Gareth Williams and the poisoning of father and daughter Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

Williams, 31, a codebreaker at Britain’s GCHQ eavesdropping centre who was on secondment to MI6, was found dead inside a locked red holdall in his bath eight years ago.

At the time his bizarre death in his London flat was dismissed as a sex game that had gone wrong.

But this week two counterterrorism detectives from Salisbury, Wiltshire – where the Skripals were allegedly poisoned by a Russian nerve agent – will question KGB defector Boris Karpichkov about Williams’ death.

Karpichkov, 59, claims that Williams was murdered with an untraceable poison because he had discovered the identity of a Russian mole at GCHQ.

The former spy told the Sunday People: “Russian security services are the connection between the two cases.”

Karpichkov, a former major in the KGB and its FSB successor, lived near Williams in London’s Pimlico and has made an extensive study of the case.

He claims he received information from a source in Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, SVR, that Williams was murdered because he knew the identity of a Russian mole codenamed Orion in GCHQ at Cheltenham, Gloucester.