There was an “abject failure” from the UK government to put in basic security measures to protect the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal – and therefore keep the wider public safe, the family of a woman who died in the Wiltshire novichok poisonings has said.
Lawyers for Dawn Sturgess’s relatives argued the UK authorities should have anticipated Skripal would have been a target, especially as he appeared to have continued to work with western security agencies after he was pardoned by Russia, but left him a “sitting duck”.
On the final day of public hearings into Sturgess’s death, her family’s legal team criticised public health experts for not issuing public warnings about picking up containers that may have contained nerve agent after the attack on Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018.
They also strongly criticised Wiltshire police for “arrogantly” stereotyping Sturgess as a drug user – which she was not – when she fell critically ill in Amesbury, Wiltshire, in June 2018 after spraying herself with novichok contained in a fake perfume bottle.
In his closing speech, Michael Mansfield KC, for the Sturgess family, said: “We say there’s been an abject failure by the United Kingdom government to protect the public.” He said a “major disaster” in which thousands of people could have died from nerve agent poisoning had been avoided only through good luck.
Mansfield said: “Clearly what happened in Salisbury and the knock-on effect in Amesbury was preventable.”
Skripal moved to Salisbury after a spy exchange in 2010 and lived openly in the city without any security measures.
Mansfield said there was “alarming access” to him and “no evidence that there were any precautions taken”. He said it would have been simple to provide Skripal with an alternative identity, given him security measures such as CCTV and alarms and settle him in a gated community rather than in an ordinary suburban street.
The barrister said it was “manifestly obvious” that an attack was possible, especially after the poisoning of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in the UK in 2006. Given the nature of the weapons the Russians were prepared to use, this caused “huge collateral risk to the public”.
Mansfield said there was evidence Skripal had carried on helping western security agencies while he was in Salisbury, which made him a target, He cited interviews with the journalist Mark Urban in 2017, which the writer says were interrupted because Skripal had to go to speak to intelligence officials in Switzerland.
Mansfield said the UK government knew that as long ago as 2013 Russian agents were monitoring the communications of Skripal’s daughter, Yulia, and revealed the family believed the would-be assassins knew exactly what the Skripals’ movements were in the days and hours leading up to the attack. This left them as “sitting ducks”.
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Barrister Jesse Nicholls, also for the Sturgess family, said the family was concerned that neither the then chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, nor Public Health England issued warnings to people not to pick up objects following the Skripal attack, despite concerns a container of novichok could have been left behind. Nicholls said: “Dawn was denied the possibility of a different outcome.”
He said the family was grateful to paramedics who had tended to Sturgess but said the Wiltshire police response was “severely inadequate”. Nicholls said: “The family consider the police’s response was blighted by arrogance, stereotyping and a lack of professionalism.” He said he believed the police had a “cultural and attitudinal problem”.
Further hearings will be held in the new year but behind closed doors because of the sensitive nature of what will be examined.
