A former Russian spy and his daughter targeted by Vladimir Putin in a chemical attack on the streets of Britain have revealed the terrifying details of their ordeal for the first time.
Sergei Skripal, a double agent who had passed intelligence to MI6, and his then 33-year-old daughter Yulia nearly lost their lives in the attack by Russian assassins in Salisbury on March 4, 2018.
The Skripals, who were poisoned after the deadly nerve agent Novichok was sprayed on the doorknob of Mr Skripal’s home, spent three weeks in comas and endured a long and painful recovery. They have been in hiding ever since.
Now, their account of the Salisbury Poisoning, as it became known, has been revealed in statements issued to the official inquiry into the poisonings.
They reveal their symptoms began as they were eating lunch at the Italian restaurant chain Zizzi in Salisbury.
Ms Skripal, who had flown into Britain from Russia the previous day, recounts how the pair initially found it ‘funny’ when their eyes began to twitch.
But their symptoms rapidly worsened and led to increasing breathlessness, vivid hallucinations and vomiting.
Ms Skripal says that, as the deadly poison took hold after leaving the restaurant, ‘everything in the street was swinging around, really, really bad’ and that she had to ‘hold hands with my dad’.
After walking for a few minutes towards the Sainsbury’s car park where Mr Skripal had parked his red BMW, they had to take a break.
Ms Skripal says: ‘We sat on the bench to catch some breath. When I sat down it was a very strange and scary feeling almost everything was blurred and colours were changing….you see it’s pink, red, blue, so it’s like being on LSD or amphetamines.’
She says she fell unconscious within seconds. She believes she could have choked on her own vomit had she not been helped by members of the public, who dialled 999.
In his statement, Mr Skripal said: ‘I remember hallucinating and seeing Arabic men and women. I tried to punch one of them. I knew it was a hallucination because there are not a lot of Arabic people in Salisbury.’
CCTV cameras showed Ms Skripal leaning on her father’s shoulder. She did not appear to be moving ‘other than making circle motions with her left hand’.
Mr Skripal, 74, recalls the moment he woke from his coma: ‘When I stopped dreaming I thought it had been one day, but really it had been 21 days.’
The incident sparked a huge investigation by counter-terror police, which involved 180 military experts in chemical warfare defence and decontamination.
The Dawn Sturgess inquiry, which is being led by Justice Lord Hughes of Ombersley, is named after the 44-year-old who was the only person who died as a result of the poisonings.
The mother-of-three inadvertently sprayed herself with Novichok after her boyfriend found the discarded nerve agent in a perfume bottle. She died three weeks later.
Suspicion focused on Russia when testing on what appeared to be a ‘military grade nerve agent’ revealed it had been developed by the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Lord Hughes ordered that the Skripals should not give evidence in person or remotely in case it gave away their location. The inquiry will deliver its verdict next month.
Mr Skripal a former colonel in Russian spy agency GRU, was arrested in Russia in 2004 and was serving a 15-year jail term for passing information to MI6 during the 1990s and 2000s when he was released in 2010 during a spy swap. But the Kremlin’s position is that double agents will ultimately ‘meet their fate’.
Police believe the poison was administered by two men who flew into Britain a day before Ms Skripal under the fake names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. That July, the spies were identified by the Foreign Office as Ivan Yermakov and Aleksey Lukashev.
They sparked ridicule after claiming they were in Salisbury to see the ‘famous 123m spire’ of the city’s cathedral.
The British Government also accuses the pair of hacking Ms Skripal’s emails since 2013, using a malware called X-Agent. The men are also on the FBI’s most-wanted list for their alleged role in interfering in the US presidential elections in 2016.
