Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Credit: Reuters
London: President Vladimir Putin of Russia “must have” authorized the nerve agent poisoning attack that accidentally killed a British woman in 2018, and he bears “moral responsibility” for her death, the chair of a British inquiry said Thursday.
The nerve agent was intended for a former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, who became a spy for Britain and had settled in the city of Salisbury. He and his daughter were poisoned with Novichok by a team of agents from Russia’s military intelligence agency and survived. But the British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after her partner found a discarded perfume bottle and gave it to her as a gift, unaware that it contained the leftover nerve agent.
She applied it to her wrists and immediately became severely unwell. Sturgess died four days later.
The brazen use of a military-grade nerve agent on British soil, and the risk that posed to civilians and the emergency services in the city of Salisbury, marked a grim inflection point in British-Russian diplomatic relations. It followed the fatal poisoning of a former KGB officer, Alexander V. Litvinenko, in London in 2006.
Delivering the findings of the public inquiry into Sturgess’ death at a news conference Thursday, the inquiry’s chair, Anthony Hughes, a former judge in the Supreme Court in Britain, said the operation targeting Skripal “must have been authorized at the highest level, indeed by President Putin,” and was intended to “stand as a public demonstration of Russian power.”
Hughes said that Sturgess, who had three children, was the victim of an “astonishingly reckless” attack that had put “an uncountable number of unconnected and innocent people” in danger.
He found that there was a “direct causal link” between Sturgess’ death and the actions of the Russian intelligence officers who had carried out the mission, their superiors and Putin, adding, “They, and only they, bear moral responsibility for it.”
The Russian government has always denied involvement in the attack on Skripal. Two men charged by British prosecutors gave an interview to the state-controlled Russia Today television channel in September 2018 during which they claimed to be sports supplement salespeople who had traveled to Salisbury because of its “internationally famous” cathedral.
The Russian embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment.