A senior army nurse who came to the aid of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal after he was poisoned with a nerve agent has described how he was “chanting” unintelligibly.
Skripal was half-raising his hand in the air and vomiting while the hand of his daughter, Yulia, was clamped in a “claw” – and at one point she had stopped breathing.
Alison McCourt, who was the British army’s chief nursing officer at the time, told the inquiry into the Wiltshire poisonings how she and other passersby desperately gave the pair first aid as they waited for emergency services to arrive.
McCourt said the Russian embassy and conspiracy theorists had suggested her presence at the scene could not be a coincidence, but she said it was pure chance and her family was going shopping and wanted to eat at Nando’s.
The inquiry is examining the death of Dawn Sturgess, 44, who suffered novichok poisoning in July 2018 after the nerve agent was apparently left in a discarded perfume bottle. The Skripals were poisoned by novichok in Salisbury in March 2018 but survived.
In a statement read out to the inquiry, McCourt said she, her husband and two children were in Salisbury on a day out on Sunday 2 March 2018 when they came upon the Skripals on a bench.
McCourt said: “The male had his arm half-raised in the air. She was in a really odd position. Her right arm was locked around the back of the bench. When I first approached the male on the bench he was chanting – unintelligible words.
“The male had vomited. I ran through his breathing airways and circulation. These were all OK. Her hand was in a claw. She was unconscious; she had vomited but her airway was clear. The female had a phone with Russian writing on the screen.”
McCourt said she put Yulia in the recovery position after seeing she was foaming at the mouth and had lost control of her bodily functions. “It was all very strange. There was no chance of two people having an epileptic fit at the same time and place,” she added. She suspected poisoning but thought it was food poisoning or botulism.
McCourt said: “I was aware the female stopped breathing for a while. It was like he was in a catatonic state.” An air ambulance arrived and McCourt rejoined her family.
Later, McCourt and her daughter had red and itching eyes. McCourt also had swollen joints. They underwent blood tests but came back negative for novichok.
McCourt, who left the army in 2022, was excused from attending the hearing on medical grounds.
In a second statement, McCourt addressed claims from the Russian embassy that her presence there was an “extraordinary coincidence”. She said they visited Salisbury because their children wanted to go to Nando’s and nobody outside the family knew their plans. She had “no prior knowledge” of the Skripals.
In January 2019 McCourt’s daughter won an award for her bravery during the incident and it became public that her mother was a senior army nurse. McCourt said this led to “conspiracy theorists” speculating on why she was there.
She said: “My involvement had no connection whatsoever with my professional role. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and malicious.” She added: “I have suffered harm and detriment to my health. I continue to receive medical treatment to mitigate the impact of that harm.”
Dr Helen Ord, a paediatric registrar who was also passing and helped, described how vomit was “pouring out” of Sergei for about 15 minutes.
She said it took 30 minutes for paramedics to arrive. “It seemed a long time.” Ord said it was a “bizarre incident” and at the time she suspected poisoning of some sort.
That evening, police contacted Ord and told her they thought it may have been a fentanyl overdose and she should throw away her clothes. Ord thought this was odd as she knew fentanyl was not a dangerous drug to touch.
The first police officer on the scene, PC Alex Collins, said if three or more people had been ill he would have considered the possibility of a chemical attack. As there were two, he thought it more likely to be a drugs overdose.
Questioned by Michael Mansfield KC, representing Sturgess’s family, Collins said that after the poisoning of the Skripals he had not been told to be aware there could be more novichok in Wiltshire.
The inquiry continues.
