by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
On March 1, 2018, Alexander Skripal would have turned 44 years old. But he couldn’t celebrate his birthday with father Sergei Skripal and sister Yulia because Alexander was dead. He died on July 18, 2017; his body cremated in St Petersburg; his ashes buried at the London Road Cemetery at Salisbury (lead image), beside his mother, Lyudmila Skripal.
To honour Alexander’s birthday, his father and sister drove to the cemetery on Sunday morning, March 4, 2018. The distance from their home in Salisbury to the cemetery is less than five kilometres; depending on the route and the traffic, the drive can take less than ten minutes. Early on that cold wintry day, the journey would have taken less time.
The Skripals’ journey, their evidence of what happened, and the police testimony, which has followed in the hearings of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, reveal a tangle of inconsistencies, contradictions, fabrications, stonewalling, and lies. This tangle is proof enough that the British Government narrative of the Russian Novichok attack has collapsed. The truth can be found in the rubble.
A Sunday morning witness named John Hiles, “a retired minister”, told the police “he was following the victim’s vehicle southbound on A30 London Road.”
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ005775_14-7.pdf
The southbound direction in the police report indicates the Skripals were driving from the cemetery back towards their home – unless the witness and the policeman confused their north and south directions.
The BBC reported on September 27, 2018, that there had been not one but several witness sightings of the Skripal car driving on the route between their home and the cemetery on Sunday morning.
Source: https://archive.is/rTG0F
What exactly happened at the cemetery that morning was witnessed by no one except the Skripals. In six years of police interview records released publicly to the Sturgess Inquiry, there is no trace the police asked either of them to explain how they had spent their morning before the attack on the Sunday afternoon. If the police asked the question, the record of the answers Sergei and Yulia Skripal gave has been kept secret.
However, the police made a “forensic management record” reporting evidence from a source the police report doesn’t identify: “Sergey and Yulia Skripal attended the graves of family members on the morning of the incident.”
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ005677_4-512-13.pdf
The only source for this police report was either Sergei or Yulia Skripal, or both of them.
Contradicting this is a police report, titled “Selective Timeline of Sergei and Yulia Skripal”, claiming “Yulia states that neither she nor Sergei left the house on the morning of 4th March.” In the version of this 11-page report presented to the Sturgess Inquiry, computer activity is recorded on devices of both Sergei and Yulia from 08:27 until 13:10. However, the pages of the report recording the early morning hours of Sunday are missing; only five of the eleven pages have been revealed publicly.
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ005775_14-7.pdf
The police report claiming the Skripals did not go to Alexander Skripal’s grave that Sunday morning is dated April 1, 2018. The date of the police record saying the Skripals did go to the cemetery is May 23, 2018. Almost two months of police operations elapsed before the evidence was switched.
Compare Tim Norman’s detailed timeline of the Skripal movements and his analysis of mainstream media reporting of what the police, intelligence services, and government officials were leaking, published in November 2022. Norman warns that neither he nor his publisher “is assessing the sources quoted as trustworthy.”
The police also claim the Skripals’ mobile telephones were switched off throughout the fateful Sunday morning until past 13:00; they leaked this information to the media. During the Skripals’ telephone silence that morning, this police report reveals they were sent three SMS messages which were in code. Between 10:16 and 10:22 two messages came in from CIK; one from SNOWQUEEN.
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ005775_14-7.pdf
The police also record that Sergei Skripal’s next-door neighbour telephoned his home landline number at 10:32 to arrange a plumbing repair. Sergei reportedly replied he “wouldn’t be in between 4:00hrs and 1700 hrs”.
Chief Metropolitan Police investigator Commander Dominic Murphy claims the absence of police evidence of the Skripals’ movements on Sunday morning is evidence that they didn’t move out of their house. “No further activity on the devices attributed to the Skripals until they were found in the Maltings. This indicated that the Skripals were at their home from the time that Ross and Maureen Cassidy dropped them off [Saturday March 3] until they left to go into the centre of town on 4 March 2018.”
The MI6 version of the Sunday morning, reported by Mark Urban, says that “inasmuch as Sergei had a regular ‘pattern of life’, a Sunday morning visit to the London Road cemetery was often part of it”. — page 262. Urban published this in September 2019. He and his MI6 sources didn’t realize the police were switching their stories.
Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/
For Urban’s role at the BBC as undercover MI6 informant, which Sergei Skripal recognized, read this.
Subsequent testing of the cemetery and the gravesite by the police and specialists of the Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory confirms that not a trace of Novichok was found. MET commander Murphy wrote in his witness statement for the Sturgess Inqury on October 2: “During 11 March, the samples obtained from the graves of Liudmila and Alexander Skripal were reported to be negative, as were the small toys which had been found placed on the graves. This confirmed our perspective that Sergei Skripal had not visited the graves and could not have been contaminated there.”
Investigators’ tent over Alexander Skripal’s grave.
Murphy’s non-sequitur has escaped the notice of the judge and lawyers running the Sturgess Inquiry, as well as of the British media. The absence of contamination at the cemetery proves only that the Skripals hadn’t been poisoned so early in the morning. That they visited the cemetery is confirmed by the police because Yulia and Sergei Skripal told them. That they didn’t visit the cemetery is also reported by the police.
What is certain for that morning’s cemetery trip is that the Skripals could not have made contact there with the two Russian GRU agents, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who are charged with attempted murder with a Novichok poison weapon. That accusation is the foundation of the British Government’s claim that Russia is responsible for the Novichok attack.
Petrov and Boshirov were not recorded on CCTV as arriving at the Salisbury railway station until 11:48 on Sunday morning.
In this police mapping of Petrov’s and Boshirov’s movements after arriving at Salisbury late on Sunday morning, the blue dots and black boxes indicate the locations where there was no CCTV sighting of the two men, or “no CCTV camera footage recorded”.
To substantiate the official narrative that they committed the Novichok crime by spraying the Skripals’ front door-handle, their timing has been calculated by the police at around 12 noon, when the Skripals were at home and when the only CCTV record of where Peskov and Boshirov were placed them about a mile from the Skripal’s house. From 12:30 until 13:03, the police have told the Inquiry, the CCTV evidence of Petrov’s and Boshirov’s whereabouts is “unavailable”.
What is certain is that the police have changed their story. Murphy has now testified in the open Inquiry hearings that “clearly we had a witness who had reported seeing that vehicle at the time. We subsequently found out that was an erroneous report and the vehicle hadn’t left at all, but when you take the fact that there were recent items left on the grave and the potential sighting of Sergei and Yulia’s vehicle, these were factors that led us to focus some effort on the grave site as well… It took some time and we were quite disruptive unfortunately to the graveyard more broadly in this process, but yes, it turned out there was no contamination at the grave site at all… It’s an equivocal there was a negative, there was no contamination at the grave site” — page 56-57.
The reason for the switch of police evidence is Yulia Skripal’s recovery in hospital on March 8 to tell her doctor, Stephen Cockroft, that she and her father had been attacked by a spray as they were eating lunch in Zizzi’s Restaurant. She also told Cockroft that she did not believe the spray attack had occurred at her home.
This is evidence that the Russians had not attacked the Skripals at all; and that the British Secret Intelligence Service had done so.
To conceal this, and reverse the evidence of the movements around Salisbury of the two Skripals and the two Russian military officers, the scene of the crime had to be removed from the restaurant, minutes before the Skripals collapsed, to the house front-door handle, hours before the collapse. Placing the Skripals inside the house throughout the morning is required for the coverup because they cannot have touched the lethal door-handle on their way into their house, on their return from the cemetery, and then collapsed inside.
Between their return trip from Alexander’s graveside and their departure downtown, the elapse of time was “brief”, according to the MI6 version reported by Urban. How long that was, how much time the Skripals spent at home on the Sunday morning depends on the police report of their computer activities during the morning. That police report is not direct physical evidence. Instead, the evidence of the Inquiry is that the police reports are contradictory. The presiding judge of the Inquiry, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley) has excluded all direct evidence from the open hearings and stopped cross-examination of witnesses on the discrepancies and contradictions. By classifying CCTV, telephone and other electronic records, it is impossible to know what Hughes has excluded in secret.
The only direct physical evidence of what happened on the morning and afternoon of March 4 is Yulia Skripal’s and her father’s. If they are alive, they have been forbidden to testify in public. Their purported witness statements are unsigned, unnotarized for proof that they originated them. Tape and video images of Sergei Skripal in a 36-minure interview with police on May 15, 2018, have been kept secret.
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ005746_19.pdf
The lawyer who has told the Inquiry he represents the Skripals, Andrew Deacon, has asked no questions of any witness during the Inquiry and presented no evidence. The only statement he has made in evidence for the Skripals was on October 14, at the opening of the Inquiry hearings: “On 4 March 2018, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were attacked at Mr Skripal’s home in Salisbury with a Novichok nerve agent,” Deacon said. — page 156.
The lawyer was lying. Yulia Skripal has not said that.
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