The woman killed in the Salisbury novichok poisonings began foaming at the mouth and convulsing 10 or 15 minutes after unwittingly spraying the nerve agent on her wrists, an inquiry has heard.
Dawn Sturgess, 44, got into a bath with all her clothes on after becoming contaminated with novichok, which had been secreted in a fake perfume bottle that her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, had given her, the inquiry into her death was told.
In police interviews read out at the inquiry, Rowley said he had told her “look what I found” before giving Sturgess what he thought was perfume as a present. He told how he had also spilled novichok on himself, and said his memory had been compromised and he was plagued by “peculiar dreams”.
The inquiry has heard that the UK government believes the novichok was brought into Britain by agents tasked by Vladimir Putin to target the former spy Sergei Skripal, who was settled in Salisbury after a spy exchange. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned on 4 March 2018.
On 30 June 2018, Sturgess, a mother of three, and Rowley fell ill at his home in Amesbury, 11 miles north of Salisbury.
The inquiry was shown CCTV footage of Sturgess and Rowley spending time with other friends in Salisbury on the day before they fell ill and then catching a bus to Amesbury.
The next morning, Rowley said, he was “hanging around” the kitchen when he spotted the package he had found containing the fake perfume bottle. Rowley said: “I spotted the package I picked up a couple of days prior and thought, now’s a better time than ever to give her a present. I think Dawn was a bit moody with me.”
He said he told her: “Look what I found.” He said the package was difficult to open but consisted of a bottle and dispenser. He struggled to get the dispenser into the bottle. “It was just tight,” he said. He eventually managed to get it open.
“I sniffed it but it didn’t smell like perfume … it touched my skin, it was just an oily substance. I can’t remember what it smelled like. It wasn’t a horrible smell but not like something I had smelled before. I thought, that’s not right. I was covered in it so I had to wash my hands. Dawn sprayed it on her wrists … She rubbed it on both wrists.
“Dawn began feeling unwell about 10 to 15 minutes after she sprayed the perfume on her wrist. She said I might need to help her but then she said she felt very, very strange and that she had to go and lie in the bath.
“After a minute I went into the bathroom to see what she was doing and found her lying in the bath with her clothes on, just lying in the bath, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. She had drool coming out of her mouth. I panicked. I tried to help her while I waited for ages for the ambulance. Her condition got worse and worse.”
Sturgess was taken to hospital and Rowley went out. Later he felt ill and returned to his flat. “I looked in the mirror and noticed the size of my eyes. I’ve never seen my eyes that small in my whole life. I ended up in Salisbury hospital.”
He said his memory had been affected. “I have very little memory of what happened before I was poisoned. This is partly because of the novichok. I noticed it affected thought processes in my head. Since the poisoning it has been a lot harder to concentrate … I have a lot of peculiar dreams.” He added: “It’s annoying that I brought it [the bottle] into the house.”
A key puzzle that remains is where Rowley found the bottle. Commander Dominic Murphy, the head of the Met police’s counter-terrorism command, said that as his account “developed” Rowley said he found the bottle in a Cancer Research charity shop bin in Salisbury. No trace of novichok was found in the bins but Murphy said the police could not rule out that the bottle was found there.
The inquiry was told that Rowley remembered the box containing the bottle as being black, though it was pink. Murphy said this may have been because he found it in the dark.
Murphy also revealed that traces of novichok were found in a van Rowley travelled in after Sturgess was poisoned and in toilets close to a park the pair visited in Salisbury the day before they were taken in – though this may have been the result of cross-contamination during the testing or recovery process.
Murphy told the inquiry that the discovery of the bottle was a significant moment in the Skripal investigation as until then they had no idea how the nerve agent had been brought into the UK, or even what form it had been in.
The inquiry was told that the perfume bottle applicator that Rowley fixed on to the bottle was long and appeared to have been purposefully designed to distance the operator from its contents, reducing the chance of contamination.
Murphy said government scientists had confirmed that the novichok that poisoned Sturgess was the same type used in the attack on Skripal. It was of a very high purity and could have killed thousands. But there was no way of knowing whether the bottle that Rowley found was the one used to target Skripal.
The inquiry has heard that reports at the time of the poisoning that described Sturgess as a known drug user were inaccurate, but Rowley did have convictions including for possession of heroin, and Wiltshire police had information suggesting he was involved in using and dealing class A drugs. Rowley told police he “may well” have taken heroin the day before they fell ill or may have just been drunk.
The inquiry has heard how the Skripals left Sergei’s house at about 1.30pm on 4 March and drove into the centre of Salisbury. Investigators believe they were poisoned with novichok as they left the house when they touched the front door handle, which had been daubed with the nerve agent.
CCTV images shown at the inquiry have traced the Skripals’ movements around the city, including a moment when Sergei handed a piece of bread to a boy as they fed ducks in a park at 1.42pm. Members of the public noticed that the pair had fallen ill at 4.15pm and called the emergency services.
