British authorities visit graves of Russian ex-spy’s wife, son
LONDON — British authorities investigating the poisoning of a former Russian spy, Sergei V. Skripal, and his daughter visited the graves of Skripal’s wife and son in the cathedral town of Salisbury, England, on Friday.
Dressed in large hazardousmaterial suits, the investigators began collecting evidence at Skripal’s house in the town and erected a blue forensic tent around the grave of the son. The police said that they had requested military assistance to “remove a number of vehicles and objects from the scene.”
Skripal’s wife, Lyudmila, 59, died in 2012 of uterine cancer, according to records from the National Health Service. His son Alexander, 43, died last year.
The authorities did not provide details, saying only that they had not exhumed any bodies, but the forensic activities at the London Road Cemetery intensified speculation about the poisonings.
Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia S. Skripal, 33, were found unconscious Sunday afternoon on a bench outside a shopping center in the southern English town.
The police later announced that the two had been poisoned with a nerve agent difficult to produce outside a government laboratory, heightening suspicions that Russia had played a role.
On Friday, army weapons experts and scores of troops were deployed to Salisbury to assist in the investigation. The 180 military personnel dispatched included the Royal Tank Regiment, Royal Marines, and chemical weapons specialists and bomb disposal units.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on Friday denied that the government was involved in the poisonings, but offered assistance in the investigation.
A day earlier, a presenter on Russia’s Channel One news program struck a different note, saying — without mentioning names — that the poisonings should serve as a warning to Russians considering betraying their country.
In 2006, Skripal was convicted in Russia of being a double agent and secretly passing classified information to British intelligence. In 2010, he was released from prison and sent to Britain as part of a spy exchange with Western agencies.