The UK government summoned Russia’s ambassador on Thursday to answer for the results of an inquiry into a 2018 nerve agent attack in Salisbury, southern England, which caused the death of a 44-year-old British woman.
Dawn Sturgess died on July 8, 2018, roughly a week after being exposed to the nerve agent Novichok. Independent laboratory testing showed that it was the same nerve agent used to poison former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury several weeks earlier.
Unlike the Skripals and Sturgess’ partner Charlie Rowley, who all fell seriously ill, Sturgess did not recover from the attack. The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry – chaired by the Right Honorable Lord Hughes of Ombersley, a former UK Supreme Court judge – was set up in 2022 to establish the exact circumstances of her death.
Hughes’ report, published on Thursday, concluded that “the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by [Russian] President Putin.”
“I therefore conclude that all those involved in the assassination attempt (not only Petrov, Boshirov and Fedotov, but also those who sent them, and anyone else giving authorisation or knowing assistance in Russia or elsewhere) were morally responsible for Dawn Sturgess’ death,” he wrote.
The report also found that officers in Russia’s GRU foreign intelligence service – Alexander Petrov, 46, and Ruslan Boshirov, 47 – had brought the Novichok to Salisbury from Moscow in a Nina Ricci perfume bottle. Instead of disposing of the bottle after making their attempt on Skripal’s life, the two men abandoned it on March 4, 2017.
“They can have had no regard to the hazard thus created, of the death of, or serious injury to, an uncountable number of innocent people,” the report reads. “Deploying a highly toxic nerve agent in a busy city was an astonishingly reckless act. The risk that others beyond the intended target, Sergei Skripal, might be killed or injured was entirely foreseeable.”
Sturgess’ partner is believed to have found the perfume bottle and given it to her as a present. Several weeks later, Sturgess sprayed herself with what she believed was perfume, sustaining a catastrophic brain injury. She died in hospital just over a week later.
The Russian embassy denied the Kremlin’s involvement. Russian state media outlet TASS quoted Russia’s embassy in London as saying that the inquiry’s findings were untrustworthy “due to the political nature of the alleged incident.”
The UK government disagrees. In response to the report, it has imposed sanctions on Russia’s GRU and summoned Russia’s ambassador to London. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said that the report was “a grave reminder of the Kremlin’s disregard for innocent lives,” as per Sky News.
“The UK will always stand up to Putin’s brutal regime and call out his murderous machine for what it is,” he added.