SALISBURY, England: British police raced on Tuesday to identify the substance suspected of striking down a former Russian double agent convicted of treason in Moscow for betraying dozens of spies to British intelligence.
Mark Rowley, Britain?s top counter-terrorism officer, said investigators needed to be ?alive to the fact of state threats? after Sergei Skripal, once a colonel in Russia?s GRU military intelligence service, was taken ill.
The 66-year-old former spy and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, were found on Sunday unconscious on a bench outside a shopping centre in the English city of Salisbury after exposure to what police said was an unknown substance.
Both were still critically ill in intensive care, nearly 48 hours after emergency services were first called. ?They are currently being treated for suspected exposure to an unknown substance,? Wiltshire Police said in a statement.
?Both remain in a critical condition in intensive care.?While the British authorities said there was no known risk to the public, police sealed off the area where the former spy was found, a pizza restaurant called Zizzi and the Bishop?s Mill pub in the centre of Salisbury.Some investigators at one point wore yellow chemical suits, though most police at the scene did not.
Skripal, who passed the identity of dozens of spies to the MI6 foreign intelligence agency, was given refuge in Britain after he was exchanged in 2010 for Russian spies caught in the West as part of a Cold War-style spy swap at Vienna airport.
?We have to remember: Russian exiles aren?t immortal, they do all die and there can be a tendency to conspiracy theories,? Rowley told BBC radio.?But likewise we have to be alive to the fact of state threats,? he added, pointing to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.A British inquiry said President Vladimir Putin probably approved the 2006 murder of ex-KGB agent Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210 in London.The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement in the killing of Litvinenko.
03-07-2018, 12:25 PM
Unidentified substance leaves ex-Russian double agent, daughter ill in Britain
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