May: ‘Highly likely’ Russia to blame for spy poisoning

London — Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday that British investigators have concluded it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for the poison attack that left a former Russian double agent and his daughter comatose on a park bench last week.

The British leader said police identified the poison as a “military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.”

She said Russia either engaged in a direct attack against Britain or lost control of the nerve agent it developed. Britain will not tolerate such a “brazen attempt to murder innocent civilians on our soil,” she warned.

As she addressed the House of Commons, the British leader stopped short of announcing retaliatory actions, saying she would give Russia a chance to respond to her government’s findings and would return to Parliament on Wednesday with a plan for specific action.

But in her remarks, May described a “reckless” and “indiscriminate” attack, which not only endangered the lives of its two principal victims, Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, but potentially exposed scores of others, including a police officer who remains hospitalized.

Skripal was jailed in Russia in 2006 for selling state secrets to British intelligence for 10 years, but he was released in 2010 as part of a high-profile spy swap. His daughter has been living in Russia but has also spent long periods in England.

May strongly signaled that the already frosty relations between Britain and Russia were headed toward lows perhaps not seen since the Cold War.