The family of a British woman killed in the Wiltshire nerve agent poisonings have strongly criticised the UK state for not doing more to keep the public safe, and believe lessons have not been learned from her death.
Relatives of Dawn Sturgess, who was killed after she sprayed herself with a nerve agent smuggled into the UK by Russian agents to kill a former spy, expressed concern that an inquiry into her death had not set out how such a tragedy could be prevented in the future.
The inquiry made limited criticism of the way the security services protected the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, who was living openly under his own name in Salisbury when he was targeted.
The family said: “Today’s report has left us with some answers, but also a number of unanswered questions. We have always wanted to ensure that what happened to Dawn will not happen to others; that lessons should be learned; and that meaningful changes should made. The report today contains no recommendations. That is a matter of real concern. There should, there must, be reflection and real change.”
They added: “Skripal was described by Vladimir Putin as a traitor and convicted of treason. Yet there were no sufficient and regular assessments of the risk he faced from Russian retaliation. That put the British public at risk, and led to Dawn’s death.
“The chair considered secret evidence from the government and the UK intelligence services. Today’s report does not set out, publicly, how the risks that led to Dawn’s death will be prevented in the future. Adequate risk assessment of Skripal was not done; no protective steps were put in place. That is a serious concern, for us now, and for the future.”
The family criticised Wiltshire police for wrongly initially characterising Sturgess as a drug user. “That was a grave mistake by Wiltshire police that should never have happened,” they said.
They also said that after the attack on Skripal, training to emergency responders about nerve agent symptoms should have been more widely circulated and more public health advice ought to have been given warning people not to pick up unknown items.
On 4 March 2018, Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, were poisoned by novichok at his home in a suburban cul-de-sac after a spy exchange. The Skripals fell seriously ill but survived.
Sturgess, 44, died after spraying novichok, stored in a fake perfume bottle, on herself at the home of her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, in Amesbury, Wiltshire, 8 miles north of Salisbury, on 30 June 2018.
The chair of the inquiry, Lord Hughes, concluded that Putin must have authorised the attack on Skripal and that he was “morally responsible” for Sturgess’s death.
He called it a “public demonstration of Russian state power for both international and domestic impact”.
The chair said Alexander Petrov, Ruslan Boshirov and Sergey Fedotov (all aliases) were members of an operational team within the GRU – the Russian military intelligence agency responsible for foreign intelligence gathering.
He said: “Deploying a highly toxic nerve agent in a busy city was an astonishingly reckless act. The risk that others beyond the intended target might be killed or injured was entirely foreseeable. The risk was dramatically magnified by leaving in the city a bottle of novichok disguised as perfume.”
Hughes said the bottle containing the novichok that Sturgess had sprayed on herself was “probably” the same one the Russian agents had used to apply poison to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s house.
He said: “They recklessly discarded this bottle somewhere public or semi-public before leaving Salisbury. They can have had no regard for the hazard thus created, of the death of, or serious injury to, an unaccountable number of innocent people.”
Rowley has said he found the bottle in a bin shortly before he gave it to Sturgess, but Hughes said it was “likely” he had come upon the bottle “within a few days” of it being abandoned on 4 March.
The chair said: “There is a clear causative link between the use and discarding of the novichok by Petrov and Boshirov and the death of Dawn Sturgess.”
Hughes concluded there had been failings in Skripal’s management as an exchanged prisoner. “In particular, sufficient, regular written assessments were not conducted,” he said. But he said the assessment by the state that Skripal was not at significant risk of assassination could not be judged to have been unreasonable.
He said he did not consider that the attack on Skripal could have been avoided by additional security measures being put in place: “The only such measures which could have avoided the attack would have been such as to hide him completely with a new identity.”
Hughes said that, after the Salisbury attack, extra training for emergency services on recognising symptoms nerve agent exposure should have been more widely circulated. He also criticised Wiltshire police for wrongly characterising Sturgess as a drug user after she was poisoned.
The chair concluded it was reasonable that public health officials had not given the public advice not to pick anything up, because at that stage it was not known where the Russian agents had been.
Hughes said he was satisfied that Sturgess had received “entirely appropriate medical care” from the ambulance staff who attended to her and from hospital doctors.
He said: “It is absolutely clear that her condition was in fact unsurvivable from a very early stage – before the time the ambulance crew arrived to treat her. This was a result of the very serious brain injury that was itself the consequence of her heart stopping for an extended period of 30 minutes or so immediately after she was poisoned.”
