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What is Novichok? Justice for Salisbury Novichok victims ‘unlikely’, says Theresa May

Mars October 11, 2024

According to former Prime Minister Theresa May, it is “highly unlikely that justice will be served for anyone affected by the Salisbury Novichok incident”.

She believes the upcoming independent inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess would “provide some comfort” to her family, who lost their lives in 2018 after coming into contact with the Russian nerve toxin.

In an interview after a BBC podcast into the Salisbury poisonings, Baroness May spoke about the inquest, where she said: “I hope that at the end of this, Dawn’s family and friends Sturgess will feel they have discovered the truth.

“Closure for all involved will ultimately only come with justice, and it is highly unlikely that justice will be served.” »

A mother-of-three from Wiltshire, Ms Sturgess, 44, died in July 2018 after ingesting a chemical weapon – disguised as high-end perfume.

Russian agents, suspected by police of targeting Salisbury-based former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in March 2018, are believed to have thrown away the bottle.

The then Prime Minister, Baroness May, expressed her “deep sadness” at the death of Ms Sturgess.

However, she said the death toll “could have been much higher” and accused the Russians of “total recklessness” given the quantity of Novichok found.

“It felt like they didn’t care about anything,” she remarked to the BBC’s Crime Next Door: Salisbury Poisoning podcast.

The Russian government has always denied any responsibility for this event.

But what exactly is Novichok and what effects does it have when administered? Here are the answers.

Military teams battled to decontaminate Salisbury after poisoning

Novichok is the name of a series of highly toxic nerve agents, considered among the deadliest ever made.

They were developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s and their name means “newcomer” in Russian.

Novichok agents are estimated to be five to ten times more deadly than the better-known poison gases VX and Sarin.

They are designed to be undetectable by all standard chemical safety tests.

Amy Smithson, a US chemical weapons expert, said Novichok was made from agrochemicals so that production of offensive weapons could more easily be hidden within a legitimate commercial industry.

Russian spy Sergei Skripal: nerve agent incident in Salisbury

The chemical “causes a slowing of the heart and restriction of the airways, leading to death by asphyxiation”, said Professor Gary Stephens, a pharmacology expert at the University of Reading.

“One of the main reasons these agents are developed is because their components are not on the banned list.”

Both Sergei and Yulia Skripal have recovered after being seriously ill following the March attack.

Pennsylvania

Anyone exposed to Novichok should be immediately connected to life support, while their clothes are removed and their body washed.

There are various potentially life-saving antidotes, including atropine, pralidoxime, and diazepam.

However, even if an effective antidote is used, there is still a high risk of life-changing bodily harm.

The Skripals were treated at Salisbury District Hospital

Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images

What happened during the Skripal attack?

On March 4, 2018, police rushed to report that the Skripals were unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, finding them in “extremely serious condition.”

The deadly military-grade nerve agent had been applied to the door handle of Mr Skripal’s home in the city.

Russians Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, who operated under the false names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, are accused of carrying out the attack. Chepiga was a senior colonel in the GRU, the Russian army.

The Skripals and the first police officer at the scene were rushed to hospital, fighting for their lives, but later recovered.

In June that year, in Amesbury, eight miles from Salisbury, Ms Sturgess and Charlie Rowley became seriously ill after handling a perfume bottle believed to have been used to transport the chemical weapon.

Ms Sturgess, 44, never recovered and died a month later, while Mr Rowley, 49, said he continues to suffer from the long-term effects of exposure to the agent neurotoxic.

Mrs May, then Prime Minister, openly blamed the Russian state for the attack on ex-spy Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

“We will not tolerate such a brazen attempt to murder civilians on our soil,” she told MPs.

His words sparked an international row in which both countries expelled their respective diplomats from their shores, while the United States and many of Britain’s other allies followed suit.

How did they get rid of Novichok?

Group Captain Jason Davies, 52, of the Royal Air Force, was awarded an OBE by the Prince of Wales in December 2019 for his efforts to decontaminate Salisbury following the attack.

As commander of the Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Task Force, Mr Davies, 52, was responsible for ensuring the elimination of the deadly nerve agent.

“It was like trying to find invisible ink. You can’t see it, you can’t feel it, you don’t know where it is,” he said.

Soldiers wearing protective suits after Sergei Skripal’s Novichok poisoning

Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images

“We have to turn to statistics, tests and laboratory sampling. You add it all up and you can start to get there.

He added: “We knew there was ground zero – the house that Sergei Skripal visited with Yulia at the time.

“When there was a death in Amesbury – Dawn Sturgess, that was really pivotal. This meant that the spread of contamination was much wider than we thought. It was a new ball game.

“It really highlights the risk to the lives of guys who have been exposed on a daily basis. The risk to my staff was felt.

Russian President Vladimir Putin under fire after Salisbury attack

Alexei Druzhinin / AFP via Getty Images

What did Russia say about Novichok?

Russia denies producing or researching nerve agents known as Novichok.

Russia was once thought to possess thousands of tons of military-used varieties of Novichok and their precursors, according to a 2014 report by the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonpartisan group working to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Along with the United States, Russia once conducted one of the world’s largest chemical weapons programs. It completed the destruction of a stockpile declared to the OPCW in 2019. The United States is in the final stages of destroying its own stockpile.

The weaponization of any chemical is prohibited under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Moscow is a signatory.

What happened to Alexei Navalny?

Flowers were laid around a portrait of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny at a makeshift memorial in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, in February.

AFP via Getty Images

Mr Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who was one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on August 20, 2020 and was transported to the hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk after the plane carried out an emergency. landing.

He was transferred two days later to Berlin’s Charité hospital, where doctors said initial tests indicated Mr Navalny had been poisoned. Mr Navalny said it was Mr Putin who poisoned him and that Federal Security Service officers had been involved in the investigation.

Mr. Navalny was released a month later.

When Mr Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021, he was immediately arrested on suspicion of breaching his parole while receiving medical treatment in Germany.

The following month, Mr Navalny’s suspended sentence was changed to one of more than two and a half years in prison, his organizations were subsequently shut down and he was labeled an extremist.

Following a retrial that Amnesty International called a fraud, Mr Navalny was found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court in March 2022 and sentenced to a further nine years in prison.

Mr Navalny was later transferred to a maximum security prison after his appeal was rejected. He was given an additional 19-year term in August 2023 due to extremism accusations.

He disappeared from prison in December 2023 and was away for approximately three weeks. Mr. Navalny reappeared in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in a corrective settlement in the Arctic Circle. The Federal Prison Service said on February 16, 2024, that Mr. Navalny died while in person after taking a walk and feeling unwell that morning.

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What is Novichok? Justice for Salisbury Novichok victims ‘unlikely’, says Theresa May

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