Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Spy in a bag death ‘link’ to Skripals poisoning
POLICE are to probe a possible link between the holdall death of MI6 spy Gareth Williams and the poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
Two counter-terrorism detectives from Salisbury, Wilts, where the Skripals were attacked, will question KGB defector Boris Karpichkov this week about Williams’s death.
The GCHQ codebreaker’s body was discovered padlocked in a red holdall in his bath eight years ago.
At the time it was dismissed as a sex game that had gone wrong.
But Karpichkov, 59, an ex-major in the KGB and its FSB successor, who lived near Williams in London’s Pimlico, has made an extensive study of the case.
He claims he received information from a source FLASHBACK Front page in Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, SVR, that Williams, 31, was killed because he knew the identity of a Russian mole in GCHQ at Cheltenham, Glos.
The Russians had hoped to recruit Williams – who had been seconded to MI6 – as a double agent by threatening to reveal his fondness for cross-dressing.
Karpichkov says: “Williams had no intention of letting the Russians blackmail him.
“But he was foolish enough to say that he knew the person who tipped them off. The SVR had no alternative but to kill him to protect their agent.”
Karpichkov claims Williams was knocked out with a drugged glass of wine before being injected in an ear with untraceable plant-based poison.