When I began writing about the Skripal case, I was moved to do so by three main considerations.

Firstly, I really am passionate for the truth, and whatever the truth happens to be in this case, I strongly desire it to be made manifest. It was clear to me fairly early on that this was not happening.

Secondly, I am also very passionate about concepts such as the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, and the apparently quaint notion that investigations should precede verdicts, rather than the other way around. And so when I saw accusations being made before the investigation had hardly begun, verdicts being reached before the facts were established, I was appalled — appalled that this was happening in what we British pride ourselves is the Mother of Parliaments, and equally appalled that this meant the investigation was inevitably prejudiced and – pardon the expression – poisoned from the off.

Thirdly, the incident happened to have taken place pretty much on my doorstep, which made it of even more interest to me.

Nothing I have seen in the intervening time has persuaded me that my initial impressions were wrong. In fact, the whiff of rodent I first detected has only become stronger as time has gone on and the case has become — frankly — farcical. Not only that, but the reaction to the case has been simply incredible. For instance, the United States expelled 60 diplomats back in March, and more recently they have effectively declared economic war on the Russian Federation – all in response to unproven and inconsistent assertions of a botched assassination attempt against an old spy in a quiet Wiltshire City. Such a response ought to raise the suspicions of any sentient being that all is not what it appears.

I still do not have any clear idea of what happened on that day, but what I am certain of is that the official narrative is not only untrue, but it is manifestly inconceivable that it could be true. There are simply too many inconsistencies, too many holes and far too many unexplained events for it to be true. And whilst part of me would dearly love to leave this wretched case behind for a while, whilst it is still ongoing, and especially as it is now being used to push us even closer to the brink of war (economic warfare is often a prelude to military warfare), I find that hard to do.

What I would therefore like to do in a series of 10 short pieces over the next couple of weeks or so, is attempt to expose some of the very many holes in the official narrative. At the end of it, I may well put it all together into one PDF, so that it can be sent somewhere, where it can be completely ignored by those that matter. Enjoy!

Number 1: The Motive

 

In her speech to the House of Commons on 26th March, the Prime Minister, Theresa May, said this:

“In conclusion, as I have set out, no other country has a combination of the capability, the intent and the motive to carry out such an act.”

For the purposes of this piece, I am not interested in her comments on capability or intent, but simply what she describes as “the motive”.

The first question to be asked is this: What exactly does she mean by “the motive”? By including that definite article before the word “motive”, she implies that there is only one “motive” – the motive – and that only one party – the Russian Federation – possessed this. Which is of course manifest nonsense. She might at that stage have said that they possessed “a motive”, but without looking into what Mr Skripal was up to, and the contacts he had, she was in no position to state that they had “the motive”.

Imagine the following scenario: A farmer called Boggis is found shot dead in his barn. It is known that a week earlier, he had a very public quarrel with another landowner, Bunce, about the boundaries between their lands, and that the two of them had to be separated before they came to blows. Could it be said of Bunce that he had “the motive”? Well, it would be reasonable to suggest that he had “a motive”, but without looking into other circumstances and other characters connected with Boggis, it would be disingenuous to claim that he had “the motive” as if only he might have had one.

As it happens, Boggis had been committing adultery with the wife of another neighbouring farmer called Bean, and Bean had found out about this two days before Boggis was found dead. What now? Does Bean have a motive? Very possibly. So too might Boggis’ wife. Perhaps even Bunce’s wife. Who knows without examining the facts more closely?

And so herein lies the first whiff of rodent. Mrs May asserted that the Russian Federation possessed “the motive”, implying that there was only one possibility, which is something that could only be ascertained by proper investigation of Mr Skripal, his circumstances and what he was up to. She therefore committed what is a most basic fallacy in the investigative process.

The second question to ask is this: she says she set out “the motive” in her speech, but what actually was that? Here is what she presented as the motive in her speech:

“We know that Russia has a record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations – and that it views some former intelligence officers as legitimate targets for these assassinations.”

This won’t do. Firstly, many countries have records of conducting state-sponsored assassinations, and not always against their own nationals. But secondly, the claim that the Russian Federation “views some former intelligence officers as legitimate targets for these assassinations” is not a motive. At best it is a claim, but it is not a motive. A motive for an attempted murder, such as this, would need to give a reason for carrying it out on that particular person at that particular time. Simply saying that they view some former intelligence officers as legitimate targets for these assassinations does not explain why they are supposed to have decided to assassinate this particular man, at this particular time, especially since they released and pardoned him in 2010. It also does not explain why they apparently decided to wreck all possible future spy swaps, since Mr Skripal had been part of such a deal, and assassinating him would put an end to such deals.

But the most important question to ask is this: are there any other parties with a possible motive for this crime? Even without a particularly careful investigation of the details of Mr Skripal’s life, contacts and circumstances, I can say assuredly that there were. For instance, it is known — although woefully unreported because of a media ban — that Mr Skripal was connected to the man behind the so-called Trump Dossier, Christopher Steele. Personally, I am reasonably convinced that Mr Skripal had a hand in putting this dossier together, given his connections to Steele, and since it was almost certainly authored by a Russian “trained in the KGB tradition”. Might this give a motive to some very powerful groups who are nervous about the origins and details of this dossier coming to light? Yes, of course. Then why is it not a line of possible enquiry? Answers on a postcard to the Department of the Blindingly Obvious.

In summary:

  1. Mrs May had no right to state that the Russian Federation had “the motive”. The best she could have said at that stage, without taking other possibilities into account, was that they had “a motive”.
  1. The motive she does present is particularly feeble and does not explain why the Russian Federation would have wanted Mr Skripal in particular dead, and at that particular time.
  1. Mr Skripal’s recent activities indicate that there were others with possible motives to assassinate or incapacitate him.

348 thoughts on “The 10 Main Holes in the Official Narrative on the Salisbury Poisonings: #1 – The Motive”

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  2. Go back to the day of the supposed poisoning of the Skripals. I checked Salisbury Hospital’s Facebook feed, nothing for the 4th March but they declare an ‘ongoing multi agency incident in Salisbury’ on the 5th March. The A&E was never closed for decontamination but remained open for ’emergencies’ and appointments. The ‘Clinical Services Journal'(see link below) reports that on the 5th March two people were admitted to Salisbury A&E after being exposed to the opioid Fentanyl. NO MENTION of a nerve agent or chemical weapon. As well as being extremely toxic Fentanyl can also be used as an aerosol. Salisbury is reported to have a major problem with this drug.
    I believe that Yulia Skripal arrived with a message for Sergei, probably about an attempted assassination attempt. He then arranged a meeting with his handlers the next day and a plan was devised to not only remove him from the scene but also to give his assassins the belief that they had succeeded. I also believe that this is all tied into the Steele Dossier. If Skripal was active and investigating any part of it then his findings could implicate not only Russia but I also believe Trump, Mercer, Bannon and the SCL Group, if the SCL Group is behind it then this would also implicate the Conservative Government and NATO

  3. Steele was admonished 2 February 2016 by his FBI handler. This was in vault dump.
    Fusion GPS only got contract from Hillary April 2016, who then subcontracted to Steele.
    But Steele was FBI asset prior to dossier being started. Was he an asset or a feeder of MI6 disinformation into US politics/intelligence?
    That McCain ended up giving the dossier to Comey, when that dossier was written by a supposed FBI “asset” would indicate the latter.
    If Sergei was Steele’s only “source” obviously his disappearance was essential.

  4. “CC Pritchard said officers at the scene underwent a “decontamination process” at Salisbury District Hospital overnight on Sunday and into Monday morning, after details of the attack became clearer.”

    But didn’t Bailey drive himself in only because he said he didn’t feel well sometime on Monday evening?

    1. @Jo. Yes, one version of the story says Bailey and two colleagues were checked out at the hospital and then discharged, but that Bailey drove himself back after feeling unwell and was readmitted.

  5. I want to present my own thoughts on party A and B, that some posters here have developed.

    My first question is : who is protecting Chris Steele right now ?
    I think it´s MI6. But I don´t think that they are happy to be forced to do that.
    Maybe there was an order of UK government to hide Steele. Because he meddled in some other things not related to the Dossier, but to Cambridge Analytica and Brexit and Fifa and….

    MI6 has to hide the Skripals, too. The reason is simply to prevent that Steele, Miller and the Skripals will ever be interrogated by the Trump fraction.

    The dodgy dossier became a heavy burden on the UK Government since Steele became known as the author.
    It is an open secret that the UK Government has secretly done everything possible to prevent Trump’s presidency. Who knows what else will come to light ?

    In another post I had mentioned the role of Alexandra Chalupa and her Ukraine connection. She’s an ambassador to the Ukraine for the DNC.
    Chalupa collected dirt on Paul Manaford for a long time.
    She emailed DNC that she’ll share sensitive info about Paul Manafort “offline” including “a big Trump component…that will hit in next few weeks“ (which never happened, at least by Alexandra Chalupa).
    Then her private Yahoo email account was hacked and a few days later DNC fired Chalupa. WHY ? Maybe because DNC needed to keep her activities off-site, where a FOIA can’t touch them ?
    But what happened on the very day Chalupa is fired ? Oh, Christopher Steele is hired. What a coincidence.
    And what happens FIVE DAYS after Christopher Steele was hired ? Oh, he publishes his first report on his dossier, a report that discusses FIVE YEARS of investigation.

    I mention Chalupa, because I strongly suspect that much of the Trump dossier goes back to Chalupa’s research. These, in turn, are based largely on information provided by the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU.

    The DNC wanted to use this information against Trump, but they couldn´t use Chalupa as the source. So the idea was born to hire Steele for the job. Outsourcing.

    The FBI has probably contacted its loyal vassal MI6 and discreetly referred to “common interests”.
    Steele then changed the dossier to obfuscate Chalupa’s authorship. But he made decisive mistakes.
    One mistake may have been to involve Sergei to some extent.

    So I’m assuming that FBI and MI6 have a common interest in preventing Steele, Miller and the Skripals from speaking.
    Maybe MI6 contacted Sergei some time before and offered him to change his identity. But Sergei refused. However, he was now alarmed and made plans to return to Russia.
    A dilemma for FBI and MI6. They now had to find another way to prevent Sergei from speaking.
    The idea of a Russian nerve agent was born. That killed two birds with one stone.

    Who executed the plan ?
    FBI alone
    MI6 alone
    FBI and MI6 together
    A third party that was willing to support the plan

    This third party could well be from Ukraine. They hate Russia, they feared that their share of the Trump dossier could come to light.
    Moreover, in the West, they can not distinguish well between Ukrainians and Russians if the perpetrators were unmasked.
    Moreover, various sources, including the German BND, have pointed out that Ukraine may still have Novichok stocks.

    Bailey’s job was to shadow the Skripals and report it. But he knew nothing of the plan.
    I think, the attack itself happened in or around the Mill Pub and Bailey witnessed it.
    However, I have no idea if the attack was done open or hidden.
    I guess hidden. Something contaminated was being smuggled into the red bag, perhaps already in the Zizzi, which the Skripals then discovered, wondering how it came in the bag, and what both were touching.
    Bailey was contaminated later, when he touched the same item (maybe a perfume in gift wrapping) inside the red bag ?

  6. Not just two groups

    In the run up to and including the war of the Iraq II WMD Debacle, Mi6 were fractured, even the bosses Dearlove and Scarlett that were running their own pro Blair operations in conflict with the rest of the service. Dearlove and Scarlett had their own objectives which were not comparable with each other (personal and professional but mainly personal) or the rest of their service.

    Mi6, Mi5, DiS (or whatever they are all called now) with GCHQ have their own infighting and conflicts of interest; within themselves, their sister services, commercial / pension interests and those of the government ….. And of course what is in the best interest of the nation. (the police forces are inconvenient uneducated, unfocussed rabbles that get in the way if they involve themselves in anything more than issuing speeding fines)

    Add to that Ministers fighting each other, Labour MP’s trying harder to bring down Corbyn than May, the Israeli and US interests ever present wherever you look.

    And top that with the US shambolic lessons to all other developed governments in the world and the examples they display of their own decorum. Clinton v Trump. FBI v CIA. (How many intelligence services are there? How many agendas have they got?) And the Sickly twisted occultist hand the CIA has in global drug production / distribution, unmetered oil windfalls, blackmail scams (honey traps, murder, vice, paedophilia). An organisation with limitless wealth and income streams, zero conscience, morality or single objective other than to control the surf / goyim / proletariat. No objectives other than to invoke misery, pain, suffering and death with crime, wickedness, fear and perpetual global wars so the elite can remain that way and enjoy their rewards.

    And we wonder why Salisbury happened, what it is about, who is doing something about it, why are they lying and covering up, who is to blame?

    The last question is the easy one to answer.

    We are!

    2. Sputnik makes an unfortunate choice of words in trying to paraphrase the Guardian article:
      “The spokesman for Salisbury district hospital, where Charlie Rowley was taken, told The Guardian that *neither* of the hospital’s patients was receiving any nerve agent-related treatment at the moment.”

      The Guardian article actually says,
      “The hospital said it could not speak about individual cases but stressed it was not treating anyone for the effects of novichok poisoning at the moment.”

      So, nine, not nether.

      More interesting is that the truth of the strained relationship between Charlie and his brother is becoming more apparent. A mutual friend told me a few weeks back that Charlie was estranged from his family by choice. Hearing that put a very different perspective on his brother’s effusively confusing statements to the press.

      2. Regarding the family relationship, when Charlie was in court for drug dealing last year (?) he was additionally charged with stealing £2,000 (I think that was the amount) from Mr Matthew Rowley. So I too remain to be convinced of the ‘brotherly love’.

        1. ” he was additionally charged with stealing £2,000 (I think that was the amount) from Mr Matthew Rowley”. That, to me, is a very odd fact. We are told that Charlie is a drug addict on his uppers (i.e. skint), yet he had £2000 that his brother (perhaps with an underlying motive to put Chalie on cold turkey – oh, wait,… oink, …, flap,…, oink, …, flap, …) sought to relieve him of responsibility for it.

          As to the mangling of the message mentioned by lissnup, both the Guardian and Sputnik would probably have got the original story from PA, following which they would then have put their own brand of spin on it.

  8. The identity of the Skripals in contained in the witness statements – those who were present at the time and clearly saw them:

    FEMALE DOCTOR: “A doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions. The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father. She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal’s face or body. The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent but added that she “feels fine.”

    She clearly states that she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting and that she had lot control of her bodily functions. I don’t know of anyone who has the ability to spontaneously evacuate their bladder and bowl at will, more especially a female in front of a crowd on onlookers. The doctor put her in the recovery position, that means on her side, so there would have been visible evidence of Yulia having lost control of her bodily functions.

    FREYA CHURCH: “Sixteen minutes later [that is, after being seen on CCTV], personal trainer Freya Church, 27, came across the victims slumped on a bench. She said they seemed ‘out of it’ and assumed they were on drugs. “It was a young, blonde and pretty girl and it was definitely the man that’s been pictured in the news – the guy that’s a spy. She was passed out and he was looking up to the sky and I tried to get eye contact to see if they were okay. They didn’t seem with it. To be honest I thought they were just drugged out as they were in a weird state. There are lots of homeless people here so I just thought they were homeless.”

    Freya Church clearly identifies them, “It was a young, blonde and pretty girl and it was definitely the man that’s been pictured in the news – the guy that’s a spy.” She also says “I tried to get eye contact to see if they were okay”, so she had a clear view of their faces.

    Destiny Reynolds, 20, who works in Ganesha Handicrafts in the centre, said: “I saw quite a lot of commotion – there were two people sat on the bench and there was a security guard there. They put her on the ground in the recovery position, and she was shaking like she was having a seizure. It was a bit manic. There were a lot of people crowded round them. It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them.”

    She says “It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them.” so these too would have had a clear view of the Skripal’s faces.

    Not one of these people, or the other witnesses, has come forward to say it wasn’t the Skripals, unlike DS Bailey, they are not subject to a gagging order by way of the The Official Secrets Act.

    1. All these witnesses would have assumed they were the Skripals because the media claimed that they were. So did the Wiltshire police at least, at that time. This is not of evidential value.

      Freya Church has been proven to be an unrelaible witness. Destiny Reynolds may not have had a clear view of their faces at all, especially as she said that there was quite a lot of commotion, and “There were a lot of people crowded round them. It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them.” How far away was she?

      I’m also suspicious of that anonymous ‘female nurse’. I had read that this first responder was a ‘male nurse’ too. Apparently, s/he was a military nurse, and had had experience with the African Ebola outbreak. S/he apparently spent 30 minutes with the Skripals! Was it her who made the original emergency call?

      Besides, descriptions differ. CCTV evidence has been suppressed, and that alone suggests that they were not the Skripals, and so does the police interest in the Market walk footage. So, no, I’m not at all convinced.

  9. I’ve not read any posts here since last night, so this post must be read bearing that in mind.

    I briefly replied to John Bull’s four points, but I’d like to say more on this. His first point related to the surveillance op being conducted on Sergei. I said more or less that this would have been standard procedure in this type of case, and the work would have been carried out by MI5 watchers. In 2006 Special Branch was merged with the Met’s Anti Terrorism Branch to become the Counter Terrorism Command, and I’m pretty sure that DS Bailey would have been seconded to that organisation, and that he was Sergei’s ‘front-line’ case officer. His roles would be to protect Sergei (an SIS asset) and to pass on intelligence to MI5’s regional liaison officer at Bristol.

    Now John Bull was assuming that those involved in this operation were one of two competing parties. The second party being covered in his second point. This is where I disagree. I don’t count MI5’s role here as being one of the two parties, for it is at least theoretically neutral.

    The other party is not neutral, and that is MI6. It is MI6 who were (and still probably are) acting in competition with the unknown group. Both groups were involved in planning a their own Skripal operations prior to 4th March. Let’s call this unknown group, Group X – This shadowy group represents certain US political interests.

    This is what I said in my original post (19th at 3.50pm) that first brought the dual-party theory into the light:

    “Let’s suppose [the film] was their source of poisoning inspiration. Let’s also suppose that two competing groups became involved at different stages. Let’s say there was a pre-planned, well-organised operation prepared by group A, but when group B somehow learnt of it, a hurried attempt was made by group B to scupper group A’s plan – which might have failed. Just speculation, but it would account for many anomalies. These two groups could be two different intelligence agences, or one of them possibly being a rogue faction within an intelligence agency”.

    This remains the bare bones of my theory, and I was deliberately being rather coy about it at the time. Of course, another party that quickly became involved in all this is the British parliament itself, and I suspect that MI6 sought urgent advice from government ministers when they realised Group X’s intentions. (They would have only given them information on a need-to-know basis). MI6, wanting to protect their assets as well as Britain’s interests, attempted to neutralise Group X’s plan at short notice. It was the hurried nature of all this, along with extreme political pressure, that caused mistakes to be made. Secret heated discussions between the US, UK and *French* governments have no doubt been going on about this situation ever since 4th March.

    I could say much more, but for now, I’ll try and catch up with a long backlog of posts !

    1. Competing groups might explain the 15:47 CCTV image if it was indeed Sturgess and Rowley, not the Skripals. If the Skripals were to be whisked away alive, a couple who could be mistaken for them, walking in a direction away from the point of disappearance and after it could be used, should the need arise, to deflect from the real circumstances by Group A. However, Group B, hastily interfering with Group A’s plan, causes a public scene, making the red herring couple a liability instead of an asset – which might explain the release of the footage (part of Group A’s original plan) but the lack of an appeal for help by local authorities (because the plan was FUBAR, making the pre-planned release of the CCTV footage a mistake).

    2. Miheila, I am not surprised to hear MI5 are in Bristol.
      Two other odd occurrences doing to mind. The cricketer Ben Stokes’ charging decision being inexplicably sent to London.
      And the mystery of “Gordon the Stalker”. Arrested nearly six months ago but not charged. A complete fabrication by extremely well-connected people in Bristol to save their bacon, with security services help.
      https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5825971/avon-somerset-police-arrest-stalker-man-sent-notes/

    1. Thanks Noone… very interesting. I signed this too, about ending the ‘special relationship’, (which in my opinion was toxic and one-sided ever since it began):
      https://action.larouchepac.com/declassifyukdocs

      Brexiteers go on so much about ‘British sovereignty’, yet they ignore the fact that Britain has effectively been a vassal of the USA for decades.

  11. I’m not saying Kier Prichard did it on his own, and the Met have their burden to carry, but what this man has achieved in such a short time is truly breathtaking.

    Wilts police are now a laughing stock, not just in Salisbury or Wilts but the UK and internationally. The public trust level must be as low as it can possibly get. The rank and file must be suffering humiliation, worthlessness, shame and depression. Motivation must be zero.

    What a jerk, why do that to yourself, your reputation, your family, your colleagues, your force of 20 20 years ? Is he really that thick, so stupid that he couldn’t see this coming and when he did he had a chance to say enough is enough or is that side of his character so flawed that he is either too cowardly or just unaware of what people think of him?

    “ACC Pritchard said: “I have a huge sense of pride taking over the reigns as Temporary Chief Constable for a force I have served for more than 20 years.

    At least Basu has had the good grace to keep his mouth shut and go into hiding.

    I can’t see how he (and others ) can avoid criminal prosecutions but it won’t be long until the civil prosecutions begin which will cost the tax payers dear. But those who are involved can expect (if they do manage to stay out of jail) to now spend much of the rest of their lives fighting litigation

    They brought it on themselves and unfortunately us but none more so than Dawn.

    Justice for Dawn!

    “Mike has been a fantastic leader and he leaves us in great shape – both in terms of engagement amongst officers and staff and, externally, as evidenced in our strong Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) gradings.

    “We are blessed with outstanding officers, staff and volunteers across our organisation who achieve great things every day and who strive to provide an excellent service to all of our communities.

    “Now is the time to look forward and to continue, as we’ve always done, with our values and communities at the heart of everything we do.””

    https://indexwiltshire.co.uk/wiltshire-police-to-get-temporary-chief-constable/

    1. Peter, They are all useless. It seems to be the only qualification needed these days. Now Jeremy Hunt is calling for more sanctions on Russia – this simply proves that he is ignorant as well as useless.

      For years Russia has been dedollarising; Russia will manage just fine with more British sanctions (and American sanctions for that matter) and the most damage will be done to British companies that will be shut out of Russia – not because of anything Russia has done but because of what their own idiotic government has done.

      TPTB are cretins!

      With immediate effect, I am starting a personal ‘buy Russian’ campaign. If I find anything in the shops that is ‘made in Russa’, I will buy it in preference to anything made in the EU. Every little helps!

      1. Ditto. There is another country that I and my relatives never buy fresh produce from, always going for South African or South American alternatives, or – if they’re unavailable – going without. I can’t say publicly which country as I might get a visit from the boys in blue!
        CF

  12. ALEXANDER GOLDFARB

    Goldfarb is a big player :
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Goldfarb_(biologist)

    Alexander Goldfarb is/was a friend of Sergei Skripal, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov.
    Associated with George Soros :
    Goldfarb was among the first group of Russian exiles in New York whom Soros invited to brainstorm his potential Foundation in Russia. In 1991 Goldfarb persuaded Soros to donate $100 million to help former Soviet scientists survive the hardships of the economic shock therapy adopted by the Yeltsin government.
    From 1992 to 1995, Goldfarb was Director of Operations at Soros’ International Science Foundation, with many more Soros projects to follow.

    Here is a chronology of Goldfarb’s press statements.
    One gets the impression that he has prompted TM how to argue.

    March 6
    Quote : Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Mr Goldfarb said:
    “The Russian secret services and the regime of Mr Putin had the motive and the opportunity to do this. And they did it before. I mean, it’s only natural for any reasonable person to suspect them.”
    Mr Goldfarb, a close friend of killed dissident Alexander Litvinenko, said he has a theory as to why Russia could be behind the latest alleged poisoning.
    The microbiologist and activist said it is not a spy theory but instead a political move.
    He said: “It is a political motivation and it has to do with the elections of the President, which will happen in Russia in about ten days from now and the major problem for Putin is the turnout because his main opponent has been barred from participating and he has called for a boycott of the elections.
    “So Mr Putin is worried there are few people who come people who are apathetic in Russia so this will be used regardless of whether Putin did it or not.
    “He has a way to invigorate his nationalistic and extremely anti-western rhetoric.”
    Mr Goldfarb said the “majority” of Russians would perceive the “poisoning” as the right thing to do as they view Putin as a leader that can “get his enemies wherever they are across the globe.”
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/927751/Russian-spy-poisoned-Salisbury-London-Alexander-Litvinenko-Sergei-Skripal-Putin-spy-swap

    March 8
    Quote : Former-spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter and a policeman have been poisoned in Salisbury in what is suspected to be a state-sponsored hit.
    But it is not the first time this has happened as Alexander Litvinenko, who was former Russian secret service officer who defected to the west, died in November 2006 after he drank tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 at the Millenium Hotel in Mayfair.
    His friend Alex Goldfarb appeared on Newsnight to warn that it was the inaction from the UK on the Litvinenko murder which led to the recent suspected attempted assassination.
    Mr Goldfarb said: “For 10 years the British Government refused to admit that the Litvinenko murder was a state-sponsored crime and up to the very public inquiry which happened in 2016 they maintained this is just a regular criminal matter.
    “The moment an English judge ruled that it was a state-sponsored murder and in all probability ordered by Putin David Cameron went on TV and said, ‘we knew it from day one’.
    “So they were trying to keep it quiet to not to annoy Putin and they invited other attacks like this.
    “If the response now will be the same, only words without any actions, there will be a third and a fourth attempt.”
    He added: “I would pick the Putin theory because he is the only one who had a motive and an opportunity too and he has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt to be involved in the previous assassination – I mean Litvinenko who was my friend.
    “He has a motive. His motive is the elections which are coming in about 10 days and there is a very low turnout expected and he needs to energise his nationalistic, anti-western electorate.”
    “So, he wants to portray himself as a tough guy who can get his enemies anywhere in the world and who has been presenting himself as the only thing that is protecting Russia and the Russians from the plotting and the scheming of the west.”
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/928729/bbc-newsnight-russia-spy-war-bbc-news-Sergei-Skripal-assassination-latest-Putin

    March 14 by Luke Harding
    Quote : Alex Goldfarb, who knew Glushkov, said he thought his death was highly suspicious. “I think it’s fairly clear it wasn’t an accident or disease. It’s either suicide or strangulation, like with Boris [Berezovsky],” Goldfarb said.
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/14/russian-exiles-nikolai-glushkov-death-london-suspicious-friends-claim

    March 17 DailyNewsUSA
    Quote : Alex Goldfarb, a friend of both men as well as a prominent critic of Russia, insisted Vladimir Putin must have ordered both hits.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpV7n-rLTU

    March 18
    Quote : Police insist they have discovered no connection between the strangling of former businessman Nikolai Glushkov, 68, at his London home last Monday and the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury a fortnight ago.
    But Alex Goldfarb, a friend of both men as well as a prominent critic of Russia, insisted Vladimir Putin must have ordered both hits.
    Mr Goldfarb told BBC Radio 4: ‘There is no connection in a forensic sense probably, but if you look at the larger picture of politics, I am convinced that no murder of this sort could have happened without the personal approval of Putin or some of his immediate deputies.’
    Mr Goldfarb was also close to former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered with radioactive polonium-210 in London, and exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead at his Surrey home in suspicious circumstances.
    ‘All of these in my view have the common denominator of Mr Putin flexing his muscle,’ said Mr Goldfarb, a scientist who lives in New York.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5514213/Murder-Putin-critic-linked-Skripal-nerve-agent-attack.html

    1. Look at actual pictures of Nikolai Glushkov. I see certain similarities between Glushkov and the man on the red bag CCTV.

      1. Could you elaborate on those similarities please? I’ve had a look but didn’t see any. The CCTV footage is terrible quality but what “image” I get does not coincide with available photos of Glushkov.

        Goldfarb is certainly a person to be avoided – with friends like that who needs enemies? Litvinenko’s dad suspects Goldfarb was his son’s assassin.

        The claim is made in that youtube video that Goldfarb was Skripal’s friend as well. It would not be a surprise but it would be good to obtain confirmation.

        1. PasserBy, if I could post photos here, I would be able to show the similarity in a collage. But it´s just a guess.

      2. I agree, Liane, and have commented here about it. Glushkov has a young, pretty, blonde daughter. I am not sure if it was the same daughter who reportedly discovered his body.

  13. Statement from Chief Constable Kier Pritchard and PCC Angus Macpherson on injured officer
    http://archive.is/Wo4lE#selection-1413.0-1413.89

    “I would like to reassure you all that Nick is receiving medical intervention and care from highly specialist medical practitioners experienced in these matters.”

    Why did Pritchard say “highly specialist medical practitioners experienced in these matters” instead of something less specific? Who are these “highly specialist” and “experienced” practitioners? The medics at SDH were quite humble in the Newsnight programme – I am sure none of them would regard themselves as ‘highly specialist and experienced’ in treating a nerve agent.

    1. And then.

      JOBS HOMES MOTORS Book an AdBusiness directory Local Info DatingExchange and Mart

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      NEWS5th JuneKier Pritchard says DS Nick Bailey poisoned at Skripal house

      Exclusive by Rebecca Hudson  @JournalRebecca

      EXCLUSIVE

      Dt Sgt Nick Bailey.

      DETECTIVE Sergeant Nick Bailey was poisoned with a nerve agent when he and other officers attended Sergei Skripal’s home looking for evidence including signs of drug use or suicide notes.

          9

      Chief Constable Kier Pritchard told the Journal he had watched evidence from body-worn cameras used by officers who first attended the scene on March 4, and that their response to the incident was “first class”.

      “We would not have known from those first hours what we were dealing with. At that time we didn’t know, and why would they, if there was anything other than a medical incident, or something that was drug-related or something more sinister,” he said.

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      SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH THE CONTENT

      CC Pritchard said DS Bailey was one of a team of officers who attended Mr Skripal’s home in Christie Miller Road, after the Russian former-spy and his daughter were found slumped on a bench in the city three months ago.

      He said officers were looking for information to establish a timeline of events and explain why the Skripals had fallen “gravely ill”, as well as making sure there was nobody else affected.

      “That [information] could be a suicide note, it could be evidence of drugs, it could be evidence of some form of substance,” CC Pritchard added.

      And he said DS Bailey (pictured) and his family are still receiving support from Wiltshire Police.

      CC Pritchard said: “Nick has been to Wiltshire Police headquarters, he came in last week and that was a very positive step forward.

      “This has been a long three months for many of us can you just imagine the impact on your children and your wife and your family life when all you’re trying to do is your job? My heart absolutely goes out to Nick and his family over all that they’ve suffered.”

      CC Pritchard said officers at the scene underwent a “decontamination process” at Salisbury District Hospital overnight on Sunday and into Monday morning, after details of the attack became clearer.

      And, following that, Wiltshire Police set up a “welfare cell” to help affected officers understand and work through the psychological effects of the attack.

      “We have supported over 90 members of our staff in either one to one sessions or group meetings,” CC Pritchard revealed. “Of course one of those 90 will be Nick Bailey”.

      CC Pritchard shared his pride in Wiltshire Police, and the citizens of Salisbury, for their response to the “colossal events”.

      “We [Wiltshire Police] have the ability and the confidence to be able to deal with international and global issues. I hope that provides real confidence to the public of how proud they can be.

      “And I want to put on record how proud I am of the community of Salisbury. They have demonstrated the true brilliance of a community.

      “Despite a global issue, and despite the massive impact, the way the Salisbury general public has responded has been exemplary.”

      By Rebecca Hudson  @JournalRebeccaHead of News

      1. ‘Spacemen’ in The Maltings on Sunday evening… officers at the scene underwent a “decontamination process” at Salisbury District Hospital overnight on Sunday and into Monday morning…

        Why would that be? SDH suspected a nerve agent by 6am Monday morning, not Sunday evening.

        The only way anyone could have suspected more than a drug overdose on Sunday would have been prior knowledge… but if someone had prior knowledge and did not ensure that ALL emergency responders were protected, that would not just be negligent…

        1. The only way anyone could have suspected more than a drug overdose on Sunday would have been prior knowledge…

          Yes and no. Don’t understand why standard clean-up operations for fentanyl poisoning are ignored here. it includes protective clothing and hosing down public areas where the fentanyl may be present. Sunday evening clean-up at Maltings was SOP for fentanyl. This is not mysterious.

          Moving from a fentanyl od diagnosis to an unknown agent occurred Sunday evening. SDH stated that in the announcements on Monday.

          1. Liane, it wasn’t just protective clothing it was the full ‘moonsuit’ but not everyone wore one. When I mentioned prior knowledge, I was thinking of Rob’s idea that British intelligence might have got wind of an FBI/CIA plot to use an agent from Porton Down. If there been any prior knowledge, then allowing any first responders to be at the scene not wearing full hazmat gear, would have been a crime in itself.

      2. Remember that Kier Pritchard had his first day on duty on March 5. Maybe he was not well informed about Bailey´s part in the case.
        Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu has taken over from Mark Rowley as the new Assistant Commissioner responsible for leading counter terrorism nationally on March 5.
        March 1 a new temporary assistant chief constable has been selected at Wiltshire Police. ACC Craig Holden joined Kier Pritchard.

        So who was Bailey´s supervisor on March 4 ? Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills ?

        1. I am beginning to wonder if Bailey was even poisoned at all. Was it all just a PR exercise? Was he told to get himself to hospital on Tuesday morning so that the nerve agent story would have at least one other person involved…

          If he was feeling ill, why did he drive himself to hospital – he could have collapsed at any second!

          If it was a bit of LARPing, that would at least explain why he didn’t need a tracheostomy.

          1. I am beginning to wonder if Bailey was even poisoned at all.

            My guess is that he wasn’t. He felt ill and as instructed went to the hospital on Tuesday to get checked out. Game was on at that point; so, he was put in a bed for observation and not allowed to leave. Drugged. That would be surreal, wouldn’t it?

            As I followed this segment in real time, there was a sense of elation in the media that they had a third victim. A first responder. Then they scrambled trying to explain what a DS would have been doing at Maltings; so, they switched it to he was at the house. Then there were questions as to why it took so long for the alleged poison to effect him. Somehow that got dropped as they continued to make different claims about where he’d been; finally settling on both Maltings and the house.

        2. Paul and Marie, if Bailey was not poisoned the OPCW has to lie !
          They took blood samples of all three on March 22. After that Bailey was released.
          I´m convinced that Bailey was poisoned with the same nerve agent, whatever agent that might be.

          1. The OPCW did not lie – but they were deceived.

            The OPCW says they checked the identities of the individuals they tested against IDs. How hard would it be for the government to issue a passport on the ‘name’ of Nicholas Bailey?

            1. This raises the question again of how the OPCW acquired the samples they took away with them. As I understand it the OPCW scientists who came to the UK are not clinically trained – they are effectively lab technicians – so they do not have the training to “take” samples from patients. They are reported as “collecting samples” but to my knowledge from reading other reports and articles it was UK medical staff who “took” the samples – and then handed them over to the OPCW. Even if they took the samples in front of the OPCW, I bet at some point they said something along the lines of “Oh hang on a minute, I just need to go and put labels on these phials…back in a minute”.

              1. In his interview on German TV, Boris said:-

                “[The OPCW] are coming in today to look at the sample we have of the nerve agent.”

    2. Two SDH physicians had a completed training in a highly specialized program at Porton Down shortly before 4 Mar. It’s been hinted that one or both were on duty 4 Mar.

      1. But Bailey did not check in until 6 March. Were PD specialists there throughout? Why didn’t they just take the patients to PD instead of risking contaminating a public hospital?

        1. Paul, if Bailey really checked in March 6, why was his police car cordoned off in the morning of March 5 at the parking lot SDH ?

          1. Because the official story is all lies Liane.

            I recall reading at some point that Bailey drove himself to SDH on Monday morning. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t find it again. I know there is a comment on MoonOfAlabama mentioning the same thing but it does not have a link.

            Then Mark Urban said in the Newsnight programme that Bailey drove himself there on Tuesday morning….

            Take you pick!

        2. Were PD specialists there throughout?

          Those were not PD specialists but SDH physicians that had received PD training. That might be in addition to PD scientists that SDH spokespersons have said were there as well. So, plenty of professionals focused on nerve agent poisoning could have been there during the first 36 hours.

          SDH had a whole new unoccupied wing they could have commandeered to isolate the patients. Also to keep regular SDH staff and their eyes away from the patients as well. Wouldn’t that be preferable to transporting them to PD with so many eyes watching?

          1. But that was my original point. A training course does not make anyone:
            “highly specialist medical practitioners experienced in these matters”

            Where does the ‘experience in the matters’ come from?

  14. I’m posting this reply to Max_B here because this is the second time that there’s been no ‘reply’ option to his posts. No idea why, but the blue word inthe corner is missing.

    If you really “don’t care”, Max_B, then why on earth are you making such a fuss over it ? I do care. And after accusing me of getting my facts wrong (over Lavrov) you apologise to newcomer (Новичoк) Cherrycoke only when s/he corrected you. Maybe you forgot.

    Anyway, you say: “Fentanyl’s and Carfentanil *are* nerve agents, I understand you want to rely on a much narrower definition of nerve agent that only includes Organophosphates, but that definition is just not accurate”.

    In your opinion only; not professional opinion which has for decades treated organophosphate agents as nerve agents, and fentanyls as (narcotic-analgesic type) incapacitants.

    You said, “The substance responsible for the Salisbury and Amesbury incidents isn’t an Organophsophate, that’s why they are scrabbling around for a redefinition”.
    I agree with this, although we are only surmising that the Salisbury/Amesbury substance is not an organophosphate (due to symptoms), for no-one has actually specified its nature. And yes, I can see that they are scrabbling around, and so are you ! Fair enough. But how can this explain why nobody has officially specified what this chemical is ? As far as I can tell, it doesn’t. Why can’t they simply be open about its nature and honest about their scrabbling ?

    Yes, of course opioids depress the CNS, but so do lots of substances such as alcohol, and, yes Peter, even axes ! This does not make them nerve agents for they do not inhibit acetylcholinestaerase – crucial to the definition.

    Wikipedia: “Nerve agents, sometimes also called nerve gases, are a class of organic chemicals that disrupt the mechanisms by which nerves transfer messages to organs. The disruption is caused by the blocking of acetylcholinesterase”.

    I perfectly understand the argument over BZ versus Carfentanyl, but surely, rather than redefine the latter as a nerve agent, why not simply redefine it as an opioid chemical weapon ? Organophosphate and carbamate pesticides are officially (and biochemically) nerve agents, but they’re not chemical weapons. In the same way, most opioids are not chemical weapons but some, such as the fentanyls should be. Salisbury has highlighted this failing, hence the scrabbling about.

    To include certain opioids as nerve agents (rather than opioid CW’s), then the official, long-established and generally-accepted scientific definition must be changed which would only invite more confusion.

    1. Agreed.
      Opioid receptor agonists are not nerve agents.
      However, if carfentanil was suspected then unprotected contact with the victims would not be the protocol.
      The true first responders were the heroes.
      Unless they knew enough ahead of time to not be afraid.

      1. “The true first responders were the heroes.”

        And they were who ?

        By the testimony of some who were aware of them (i.e. the unfeeling Freya Church) just walked on like The Good Samaritans they most certainly are not!

        Perhaps there was an assumption that in an, allegedly, druggie infested town like Salisbury, most people would ignore the histrionics of the pair on the bench and walk on, leaving it to ‘the first responders’ to deal with it. Convenient, if it worked.

        1. If, and it is an if, the lady doctor and the nurse rushed to give the two prone figures first aid without considering their own safety then these two are the only heroic ones in this shambles.

      2. As of 4 Mar, there has been no known fentanyl overdose in Salisbury. First responders would have been trained in what to look for and how to proceed in a fentanyl od situation, but practice makes perfect. There’s not that much difference in the emergency response protocols for fentanyl and carfentanil. The difference is in the medical treatment in the hours and days after the first couple of hours, and symptoms, treatments, and responses rather than tests for the presence of carfentanil is the guide for physicians.

  15. Rob, you are a great one for making lists of questions. You may have this one on a list already:-

    If HMG knew that Russia had declared death to all traitors, what measures did they take to protect Sergei Skripal, a confirm traitor but also a member of our security services. And why were those measures so lamentably unsuccessful?

  16. Rob,

    Look who is the Home Secretary’s right hand man.
    Front bencher? Is he tresspassing?

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-44728026/amesbury-novichok-poisoning-sajid-javid-asks-russia-for-explanation

    Listen to Javid. The UK has never said what happened, (that’s why we have the Blogmire) and I don’t recall ANY Russian account, other than denial and show us evidence.
    Glen needs to improve on his nodding skills. He is about three seconds too slow.
    Time and practice will no doubt improve this.

    1. “Hear, hear, honourably learned friend, Duncan !” Nod, nod, wink, wink…

      Those pontificating, sycophantic buffoons sicken me. What a charade. Fancy having beings like that running the show !

  17. Rob, as ever good stuff.

    Having followed your excellent blog for some weeks now, I’ve become convinced that there are four distinct elements to this affair: two opposing clandestine ops, an almost unbelievably idiotic false flag charade, and a random death:-

    1. Operation ‘Let’s Keep Tabs on Sergei’. Run by MI5/6/SB to make sure their double agent doesn’t come to any harm or become a triple agent. Electronic tagging, email monitoring, phone tapping, and friendly chats ever now and then. Worked well for years, then the wheels fell off on 4th March.

    2. Operation ‘Let’s Extract Skripal’. Run by an unknown security agency but possibly contracted out to another. Deniable soft extraction so he could be wheeled out later to give evidence concerning the Trump Dossier, with or without his co-operation. The plan included his daughter, because she was needed to ensure Sergei said what he was supposed to say when the time came. Phase One carried out successfully on 4th March. Phase Two delayed by HMG playing silly games, but eventually mission was accomplished.

    3. The ‘Let’s Blame Putin’ Charade. When MI6 reported to its ultimate boss that an ex-Russian spy had been poisoned, Boris would have rightly assumed the culprits were probably Russian. But then, remembering how Lavrov humiliated him at that press conference in Moscow last December, he decided to make sure Russia did get the blame and take the rap for it. With the help of the new inexperienced Defence Secretary and others, he came up with a hastily and ill-conceived plan to show that the poison could have only come from Russia, ensuring Russia’s guilt. The Home Secretary at the time, Amber Rudd, did not buy into it so had to be replaced, but others – including the overworked Theresa May – were taken in. The narrative quickly fell apart, but having persuaded the world and his wife of Putin’s guilt, there was no going back. The hole Boris dug just got deeper. And all the evidence – or the lack of it – had to be destroyed. No wonder Boris resigned.

    4. A Tragic Death. Four months after Skripal, a couple in Amesbury were hospitalised for drug misuse; just two of the many cases SDH would have dealt with during the year. But having been persuaded by HMG that the Skripals had been poisoned with Novichok-that-only-comes-from-Russia, the local authorities took no chances and assumed the two from Amesbury had been likewise affected. HMG, desperate to keep their narrative alive, leapt on the incident to re-ignite the anti-Russian rhetoric and claim Dawn’s death was ‘murder’, ‘a terrorist act’, ‘a war crime’ etc. etc. The narrative was even more idiotic than the first one (a scent bottle in a litter bin for four months!) – and ironically, it blew the gaff. They said Dawn was poisoned by the very same Novichok-that-only-comes-from-Russia and died because she received 10-times the dose Skripal got. But we know she took eight days to die. It could not have been Novichok.

    Perhaps the police should stop trying to hunt down non-existent assassins and investigate Boris Johnson. The crime? Misconduct in public office, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

      1. Duncan – I read your excellent piece after posting my ‘Four Elements’ bit. I think you’re right. You’ve hit some good points.

    2. ‘A tragic death’
      If Salisbury and the aftermath was not already crazy, Amesbury hit new heights of idiocy.

      A woman was taken from a house with poisoning in the morning but others in the house were not taken to hospital for observation.

      Later the same day, the other occupant of the same house fell ill. Decontamination tents were sent to the location but were not used. Instead police put the second victim in an ambulance with no protection whatsoever.

      Just watch this short video and ask yourself – what were the police thinking!!**??

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-44729888/footage-of-amesbury-poisoning-victim-entering-ambulance

      1. Two days after Dawn and Charlie had been admitted to hospital, and as a direct result of the Amesbury incident, Detective Sergent Erin Martin of Salisbury CID took the “…unusual step…” of issuing an official warning via Wiltshire Constabulary to “…drug users…” in south Wiltshire “to be extra cautious”, . “We are asking anyone who may have information about this batch of drugs to contact the Police”, “…where the drugs may have been bought from, or who they may have been sold to.”

        1. Thanks, Max_B. That’s interesting. So at least Salisbury CID didn’t fall for the Novichok nonsense.

          By the way, I agree that any agent which attacks the central nervous system can be termed a ‘nerve agent’.

    3. John, you’re poaching my theory ! The one I hinted at in an earlier post (yesterday I think).

      Like you, I’m convinced that two opposing covert ops are involved.

      Your point 1. would be standard practice. Sergei would have been subjected to discreet surveillance by MI5 watchers and GCHQ throughout his British exile. Most likely heroic DS Bailey was his local case officer. But let’s not forget that Sergei was still working for MI6 and that Pablo Miller was probably still his controller (line manager). There’s a saying, ‘once an intelligence officer; always an intelligence officer’ – a saying which certainly holds true for many ex-SIS folk. It was his covert activities that lead to your next point.

      Your point 2. is more or less exactly what I had worked out myself, and I’ll be working on the finer details for some time yet.

      Your point 3. is spot on too. This is the opportunistic ‘political capital’ angle I mentioned in an earlier post.

      Your point 4. I see this as a crude continuation of the above. A further opportunity. Nothing more.

      Eventually, we’ll be joining more and more dots together. Good work, John !

  18. Means and Opportunity.

    By means, this would be which group of people would have the capability to be able to do this, AND be stupid enough or possibly arrogant enough to do it?

    Gavin, Gary and Boris
    Motive, means and opportunity.

    Mrs May was having another tough week. Surprisingly, the Brexit negotiations were not going well, and Boris was still the Foreign Secretary. With Mrs May out of town, her new nodding dog minister of Defence, Gavin Williamson thought up a great spoof. If it all worked well, he could get an extra biscuit from Theresa, and just to keep all his options open, his potential new boss Boris would also think he had done good.

    Everyone likes pointing the finger at Putin, and Russia holding a successful World Cup would make the upcoming sea trials of our new carrier seem insignificant. Although, as there are no planes for the carrier to deploy, these sea trials may be quite short.

    Little Gavin got in touch with his mate, Gary Aitkenhead. Gary was a perfect fit to run PD. Non-scientist, no military background. Gary’s experience was in mission critical transmission systems. He progressed to this after an earlier spell in non-mission critical transmission systems, and while it was true that no one in the interview process bothered to ask, Gary believed that the answer would not be understood either.

    Gary’s role in running PD (which is an astonishing 3,800 people) meant he would be perfect for Little Gavin’s plan. If Gary confirmed the presence of hexamethylchicken poo on the door handle, then everyone and anyone at PD would believe that this had been confirmed by one of the secret labs.

    The secret labs do secret stuff, so the whole site would believe it, and therefore the UK media and public would too. Probably those weird guys who gassed the monkeys during that Pentagon nerve agent, secret contract that is in the public domain in the US as it was a GSA tender award, and the US have this quirky stupid law that insists congress state where their tax dollars are spent.

    Boris had to be brought in at some stage. We couldn’t have BJ blowing his usual classical Greek phrases without some prior warning.

    Once Boris heard the plan, he was really pleased.
    If it collapsed in a shambles it was Mrs May’s fault.
    If it looked golden, then HE the FOREIGN SECRETARY would be in the sunlight again.
    Boris did make one minor mistake, he announced that the nerve agent was Novichok before Gary at PD could draw up the fake lab fake report.

    This did not faze Boris, as it just showed how clever he was. Not many Foreign Secretaries have a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometer instrument sitting beside their Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry Time of Flight doodah in the upstairs toilet.
    So, it came to pass.

    The hapless Skripals were dosed shortly before their arrival at the park bench.

    On cue, the fantastic UK NHS team responded with Military doctor, Military nurse, emergency response teams, ambulances, paramedics, helicopters, police rapid response teams all arriving in seconds.

    Some of them, who were smokers were actually there early, and initial CCTV footage caught a couple of them drawing on a fag while donning the Hazmat suits at 4:05pm which was a few minutes early, but would anyone notice men in green space suits in Salisbury town centre?
    If spotted, the members of the public might think it was Goths having a no uniform day.

    Det Sgt Bailey, thankful that the Terror attack was on a Sunday (overtime at double rate for Sunday) then did his part. Perfume spray bottle in hand (what did the CIA at PD put in this anyway?) got in his car and quickly sped round to the Skripal home.

    Taking care to avoid the Guinea pigs and the cat, he sprayed the door handle. However, by that time it was dark, and he mistakenly had the spray nozzle facing the wrong way.

    Now what?

    He quickly phoned his contact at MOD, who expressed delight that the Russian terror attack had singled out a UK bobby. Perfect, this might just be the spark the rag tops need to fire up public outrage.

    Bailey got himself to SDH and on the way lobbed the perfume bottle at some homeless folk at QEG.

    “Give this to Charlie when you see him, but make sure he is stoned when you hand it to him. Don’t worry its hand sanitiser, so it may smell strange to him and no use at all to you lot.”

    Well, although Little Gavin’s plan seemed fantastic, Mrs May was not so pleased.
    She knew that anything touched by Boris quickly turned to mush

    “I should fire both of them from my cabinet, remove the whip and maybe even go further. I am so mad at them, I may even ask them to stay away from the members bar for two nights.”

    But by now the scene was set, and it got even worse. The Skripals recovered, even Bailey too.

    The Sun had already written the pithy title.

    “Russian Novichok gang with a woman, claim five victims in stunning daylight attack on UK soil”

    The Sun editor then shortened it to:

    “Kim Kardashian chooses sun tan cream.”

    The next few months brought very little new developments.

    US sanctions against Russia kicked in. The Rouble collapsed. Starving Russians demanded Putin take action. Small thermonuclear strike against miscellaneous Baltic states. NATO sent a strong warning letter, threatening more diplomatic expulsions. Russian increased natural gas prices 600% to recoup some currency from Germany.This resulted in 2,300,000 deaths during a severe winter. Brexit negotiations continued.

    Not much changes.

    1. @Duncan
      ” as there are no planes for the carrier to deploy, these sea trials may be quite short.” – which explains why they are taking the carrier to US east coast for sea trials, they can play their games using American F35s (because we haven’t got any we that we can use). I wonder how long the deck will last ?

      1. Thanks Cascadian.

        I noticed that the pictures that I saw had helicopters on the deck. (That picture must contravene the Official Secrets Act, as it shows our strike force capability)
        I did think the article stating where “Russian submarine activity in the north Atlantic poses new threat” seemed a bit extreme.
        Not being a naval man myself, I thought that subs were usually kept in the sea, and if my geography serves me correctly, Russia does have a north Atlantic coastline, it might be prudent for Putin to keep them there.
        Just a wild guess.

        1. Or maybe they have finally come to their senses and realised it is a White Elephant Too Far

          So they are going to sink it with a Russian Torpedo

          Daft? Not as daft as Salisbury!

          1. Peter,

            You can see the headlines.

            “Russian terror subs circle carrier”

            Little Gavin pipes up ” We know the subs are underwater. To what depths will Putin’s death squad sink?”

        2. Ooh, they’ve got subs, very quiet diesel engined subs, it’s enough to give any carrier crew a healthy dose of the shivers.

          Why we didn’t buy the F22 is a total mystery to me, the F35 is a very expensive maintainance problem masquerading as an advanced carrier borne aircraft. It’s tough enough to maintain its anti-radar surface coating without exposing it to all that salt spray.

          Just a thought, has anybody noticed any civil servants on Mastermind lately?

          For past stunningly prescient (NOT) decisions by our governments: F111 vs TSR2; handing over all our sound barrier research on the Miles M52 to the Bell company (who, after promising to share their research classified it all).

          Most American dictionaries stop before they get to the word ‘trustworthy’.

    2. More than thousand words :

      Gavin Williamson MP has retweetet
      Julie Bishop‏@JulieBishopMP 20. Juli
      The UK is one of our most important international partners. Few nations are as like-minded on foreign policy, defence, security and intelligence
      https://twitter.com/GavinWilliamson

  19. Rob,
    You said:

    “Party A is British Intelligence, whereas Party B is perhaps some sort of Trump supporting element of US Intelligence/military. The Skripals are therefore currently under their protection. Have I got that right?”

    Broadly yes; that is the bare bones of what I currently think.

    You counter with:

    “Party A would be FBI/CIA Intel with nerve agent from US part of Porton Down, and Party B would be British Intelligence believe what Party A is about to do is potentially disastrous, and so try to stop it.”

    I have two particular issues with that idea. I mention them, to see whether they can be answered in a way that allows us to build a scenario around your idea.

    Firstly, when you say FBI/CIA, what you really mean is Cabal. The FBI/CIA would be acting on behalf of HRC/DNC/Obama/etc. to remove an individual who could expose them and throw light on their illegal activities – specifically spying on Trump. Why would May/M_5/M_6 want to stop that? They are in exactly the same boat and do not want their role to be disclosed either. Also Sergei was nothing but an expense for HMG; they already had all the information he was ever going to give them.

    Ah, you say, British intelligence didn’t like the idea of a nerve agent being set loose in Salisbury. OK, well why not just have a word with the FBI/CIA and agree to do it in a way that keeps everyone (except Sergei) happy. I am sure that between FBI/CIA/M_5/M_6/HMG, there was something that they could all agree would do the job and not threaten the whole of Salisbury. Why not just get him at home?

    But that isn’t my biggest problem.

    Secondly, Sergei was on British soil. If HMG/M_5/M_6 got wind of a plan to kill him, why would they not just take him off the streets immediately? Get him into protective custody. He had already been to the police to say he was in fear of his life, so get him somewhere safe. Then there is no need for any ‘nerve agent’ attack at all. The FBI/CIA might be a bit miffed but Trump would not complain; he would say British intelligence did a great job!

    In this case, Bailey visits Sergei on Saturday morning and says: “Right Sergei, go and get Yulia and then we will take you in. You will be safe for the rest of your life. All you have to do is give me the SD card and we will take care of the rest.” Job done and it would have saved an awful lot of ferreting around in rubbish bins ever since.

    So if party A was indeed some black op of the FBI/CIA, why did party B let it proceed right up to 4 March and then try to thwart it at the last moment, instead of just killing it stone dead? If party B didn’t stop the FBI/CIA earlier and Bailey was sent in to save the Skripals, it rather looks like they didn’t get the SD card anyway…

    1. Dear readers,

      I have sent Liane my missive. Hopefully she will have more success than my attempts to publish it.
      After Rob’s Motive, the follow on is Means and Opportunity.

      I wonder just how much covering up of cover ups goes on when the various factions are all looking to keep their budgets in the ever expanding war on terror.
      My instinct is that each group would happily drop the others in the brown stuff.

      1. Duncan, no success either.
        They are interested in the “big picture” that UK does not provide any evidence.
        The “small pictures” like 3 children were put in danger and all the other inconsistencies doesn´t matter.
        So we must employ a hacker to find certain emails… that would make it in the news.
        Or the Skripals get in contact with Blogmire…

    2. Good points Paul. For now, the only thing I’ll say is with regard to the second problem, which is this. It would all depend on when this plot was discovered. If it was days or weeks in advance, then yes, you’re absolutely correct. But if it was some time on the morning or even early afternoon of 4th March, then that would change things. And to be frank, even if there was a “cover up” of a “cover up” it doesn’t look like it was very well thought through.

      Rob

      1. Rob,

        If party B discovered the plot on Sunday morning, they would have had the whole day to find Sergei and take him in. Sergei wasn’t trying to hide; they would have found him easily on council CCTV. There would also have been police cars all day outside Sergei’s house, waiting for him and police would have been crawling all over the city.

        If party B discovered the plot at, say, 2pm and Sergei was not at home, they still had options. Surely the police would have launched their procedures for something like a bomb threat. The city would be closed off immediately and police would have been everywhere. People would have been told to evacuate the city and get to safety. Given 2 or 3 hours, procedures would exist to minimise the risk to the general public.

        Even if they only had one hour’s notice, I can’t see the police doing nothing and allowing a nerve agent to be deployed.

        1. I should add that I still believe that on the Sunday and Monday, the Wiltshire police were honest and did a proper job. Some very funny details emerged very quickly… by Monday evening they knew that this was a scam and on Tuesday the Met was brought in to cover it all up.

          1. I should add that I still believe that on the Sunday and Monday, the Wiltshire police were honest and did a proper job.

            Agree.

            on Tuesday the Met was brought in to cover it all up.

            Disagree. The Met or Met CT was in the lead as early as 7:00 PM on Sunday and no later than 9:00 PM. Publicly for the next day and a half SFD and SDH referred to the Met as a ‘partner,’ but one of the local police seniors did say on Monday or Tuesday that they were relieved of command on Sunday.

              1. Okay – so what do you do with the subsequent statements from SDH/NHS that have clearly stated that on Sunday evening, SDH contacted NHS “Radiation, poison, etc.” and NHS “Radiation, poison, etc” promptly contacted Met CT?

                Did Met CT respond with, “We’re busy with our tea and crumpets and it’s not our patch anyway?”

                The Monday announcements were issued by SDH and hours later the SPD, but we now also know that by 06:00 on Monday buzz about unknown agent and Skripal had spread throughout several UK agencies. Do you seriously think that SDH and SPD were in the lead that day? That referring to ‘partners’ was a simple nicety?

                Is there not even a semi-automatic communication link from SPD to Wiltshire PD and the Met? Shortly after the incident, if we accept a Skripal neighbor eyewitness, a SPD patrol car stopped at Skripal’s house. That indicates that Skripal has been preliminarily identified as one of the bench people. Even if that eyewitness is wrong, nobody disputes that a team of police arrived at Skripal’s house sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 PM and by all accounts gained access to the house and searched it. If the Met or Met CT had any boots on the ground by then, they wouldn’t have had enough to handle the search on its own. So, of course, local police assets were involved in this.

                Do you think Craig Holden and Cara Charles-Barkwrote the statements they read on camera on Monday evening? Statements that only covered the barest of information,

                https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/video/sergei-skripal-suspected-poisoning-police-and-hospital-news-footage/929998464

                You honestly believe that SPD operated exclusively on this matter from Sunday evening until Tuesday?
                Seemed to me that there was a bit of chaos at the law enforcement end on Monday as they didn’t get much done by that evening statement and when national reporters were beginning to show up. SPD couldn’t ascertain that a crime had been committed. Was Met CT pushing for a crime? Somebody behind the scenes with power sure was.

                Boris had his script ready to go as soon as Rowley (Met CT) announced that Skripal was one of the victims.

                1. Marie, I don’t know why you are ranting at me, all I did was post a link – that is the official story!

                  Anyway, just to correct a couple of things for you:

                  “…police arrived at Skripal’s house sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 PM”
                  No Bailey was there by 5pm.

                  “…by 06:00 on Monday buzz about unknown agent”
                  No the buzz by 6am on Monday was about a former Russian spy. The news of an unknown agent came later on Monday morning.

                  1. I find it helpful to be as precise as possible when so much possible evidence is mushy or conflicts.

                    SPD has stated that the team of officers including Bailey went to Skripals house Sunday evening. I don’t recall that SPD has given the time of they arrived. Skripals neighbors reported seeing several police cars and officers at Skripals house at 7:00. As eyewitnesses aren’t generally all that reliable as to the precise time they observed something, I merely accepted 7:00 as the earliest and allowed that it could have been as late as 8:00. Either of which are good enough for a reconstructed timeline.

                    As to the report from one neighbor that a police car arrived at Skripal’s house at 5:00, there’s no other evidence to support that. I’m sort of accepting a 5:00-5:30 visit by a lone police car because checking on a home of a patient whose identity would not have been firmly established at that point is sort of what police do. I could have been Bailey, but I doubt it because it’s too routine. That person wouldn’t have entered the house. Likely knocked on the door and reported back that nobody was home. It’s relevance for me is that it gives a time as to when Skripal had first been identified as one of the two possible patients.

  20. Key Elements of the Hoax

    (I say key because a big part of the Hoax has been to throw in distractions, red herrings and a ton of irrelevant stuff to confuse and overload the story – It is Not meant to be understood)

    The Conflicting advice of Novichoks that Public Health England (PHE) promulgated compared with that of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Nerve Agents (the OPCW hadn’t put anything out on Novichok specifically for the simple reason they didn’t know anything)

    https://www.opcw.org/about-chemical-weapons/types-of-chemical-agent/nerve-agents/

    The Director of Public Health England (PHE) Paul Cosford saying that Novichok actually does take a minimum of 3 hours to take effect after contact with a large dose

    “If you become ill with this stuff (Novichok) from actually coming into contact with a significant amount of it then its within 6-12 hours, maximum (that symptoms would occur) – 3 hours is the minimum but you have to be in touch with a large dose.””

    https://www.spirefm.co.uk/news/local-news/2630419/amesbury-incident-novichok-could-be-active-for-50-years/

    https://www.gov.uk/government/news/phe-statement-on-incident-in-amesbury

    Summary

    PHE – Risk to public remains low (Depsite being dead). “This Stuff” (Novichok) take effect in not less than 3 hours IF you get a very large dose through the skin

    OPCW – Nerve Agents are deadly, the more toxic they are the deadlier they are. They are designed to kill. Through Skin contact will present symptoms in 20 – 30 mins, (inhalation much quicker)

    …………….

    No CCTV released by police.

    Which would establish the actual Time Line rather than that of the Fake Official Narrative.

    It would establish what the Skripals looked like that day and what actually occurred at the bench (the police don’t want us to know either)

    It could have saved the lives of the 3 children that Sergei gave bread to in the park when he first arrived in Salisbury that day if the boys had been poisoned by Novichok.

    Bailey’s Body Cam would establish what he did at the bench and Skripal home.

    …………….

    The Government Lie that it was the Russians that did it and could only have been them.

  21. Dear Readers,

    I have a tome which addresses means and opportunity, and when I can paste it to the Blog you will hopefully see it.
    I will still bang on about Skripals and only Skripals being the park bench victims.
    We know that they were in Zizzi’s after the duck feed with the boys, then onto the Mill Pub.
    As many of the recent posts had pointed out the Mill Pub has lots of CCTV footage and the police spent quite a long time interviewing the staff. (As one does in a terror investigation.

    The Telegraph was still reporting that the Mill Pub was the last port of call before the park bench. I think that is true. However, TPTB want us to “ignore” that location and focus on the Novichok that dripped from Zizzi’s table.
    Why?

  22. The US media has send journalists to Salisbury very early.
    For example Ellen Barry, NYT. These journalists have influenced the official narrative to a decisive extent.

    On March 9 ABC News has send their chief reporter Terry Moranto to Salisbury.
    This is the video :
    https://abcnews.go.com/International/video/soldiers-heading-scene-poisoning-attack-england-53638197

    He used the Snap Fitness CCTV to establish the „fact“ that the Skripals went from Zizzis through Market Walk to the bench.

    Rob, just another false translation of what Putin said about traitors.
    Listen to Moran´s interpretation at 2:00 in the video.
    Quote : Vladimir Putin’s held a town hall session and he was asked about this five’s that had been traded and he said, and this is almost a direct quote : „They will kick the bucket. Trust me. They betrayed their colleagues, their brothers in arms. And they took thirty pieces of silver and are gonna choke on all that.“ [End quote]

    At 3:00 Terry Moran shows the CCTV of Snap Fitness.
    It´s outside at the right side of the entrance.

    1. Do we know when the Snap fitness external cctv camera appeared?

      Seen in above video @ 3:10 / 14:16

      And compare

      http://bd8.com/russia/skripal/files/snapfitness.jpg

      It may be that the front signage overhang just hides it but it could be a more recent (temporary?) attachment

      If this was my town the little darlings would have smeared the camera with vindaloo or something worse.

      So was it added for the “occasion”?

      1. That is one heck of a spot!

        The CCTV camera in the video is directly above the red notice on the inside window, next to the bell push.

        You can see enough on the jpeg image to see that it is not there. Do we have a date for the JPEG?

          1. Peter, the camera cannot be hidden behind the awning. We know from the CCTV couple that it can collect images above head height on the opposite side of the walkway – both of the images we have do not show the camera and were shot at head height… if we cannot see it because it is hidden, then it cannot see people walking by.

            Also, if that was a recent set up, it would be very easy to set it up to be monitored from a remote location, not just from inside the gym.

            1. Excellent point Paul, if the camera can see you on the other side of the Walk Way, you can see the camera.

              1. The Google Street View camera operator, in the capture that Paul links to above is in the exact position the “skripal pair” were in when they walked through Market Walk
                [Library (Maltings end Door) opposite (Castle Street end) Snap Fitness Panel]

                Google Street View shows area above the pair’s head’s

      2. Peter : “It may be that the front signage overhang just hides it but it could be a more recent (temporary?) attachment”

        The front does hide the CCTV camera, unless viewed from a low enough position.
        The CCTV camera can be seen – just about, if you zoom in – in an image from when Snap Fitness was opened last September. I reckon this is very close to where the CCTV couple passed by.
        https://cml.sad.ukrd.com/image/610607-1200×800.scale_type-center_crop.jpg

        https://www.spirefm.co.uk/news/local-news/2387557/24-hour-gym-opens-in-salisbury/

        The CCTV camera is hidden in the other images because the front is lower than the ceiling that the camera is attached to. That can be seen In the ABC report where the front casts shadows on the ceiling.

        The Google street view image was taken in the same month as the Snap Fitness opening, but the CCTV camera cannot be seen because Google’s camera is too high up (it’s higher up than the people in the image). The other image that you link to was taken either too high up or too far away.

        1. Thanks Brendan

          I can get the Google thing being too high and in fact I did go looking for a Google camera reflection and found this

          https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.0690239,-1.7971829,3a,15y,276.17h,87.25t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sYuw0H5f8cQ8PRp3OIGxKig!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

          But the other I’m not sure about but no exif or other date info, the Spire FM link you provide I can’t get anything out of and your first (cml.sad) I can’t get any data on either but can see the bottom of the camera.

      2. “Flat Earth New” by Nick Davies. It provides a plausible reason for the phenomena where all the new media carry the same headline and column with minor changes – it all comes from one source via a single feed that they all subscibe to (the Press Association, or sometimes Reuters).

  24. Hi Rob and all,

    We keep talking about the “official narrative”. But actually, what is the official narrative and where does one find it?

    I do try to keep up with events around the Skripal case. The media regularly and frequently cite “sources”, official or otherwise. But have there been any actual authorised statements from the government containing anything like an “official” version of the events? There was Theresa May’s statement to Parliament in March, but has there been anything since? If so, I must have missed it (which is quite possible).

    For sure there’s a media narrative. The media keeps floating new stories or bits of new information. But the media stories are often either self-contradictory or just plain nonsensical. Does this amount to an “official narrative”?

    Is the “perfume bottle” official for example? Or the novichok in the public toilets? Or are these only media stories?

    I read in earlier posts that the police have issued an “official” timeline (contradicting earlier eye-witness accounts). Is this the case? Is there really a police timeline that one can look up in any official source, or is it just another media story?

    Most recently the fact (?) was reported – apparently as a Guardian exclusive – that the government is “poised” (whatever that means) to submit an extradition request to Moscow. If true, it would be a very serious act. Has it been officially documented, or is even this simply another media story?

    I apologise if I’m talking rubbish here, but I have the impression that there no such thing as an “official narrative” beyond what May told Parliament in March. Everything since then has been media smoke and mirrors. Or an I missing something?

    1. I totally agree with you.
      And it seems none of the media is inclined to pin down and demand the official story.
      It is to the government’s advantage to allow the media to run with unnamed sources to reinforce the Russia dunnit scenario, without themselves committing to it

    2. Hi John,

      When I use the term “official narrative”, which I do a lot, I am basically referring to three simple claims:

      1. That Sergei and Yulia Skripal, along with D.S. Nick Bailey, were poisoned by a “military grade nerve agent” known as a Novichok.

      2. That responsibility for this act lies with the Russian state.

      3. That the poisoning took place at the home of Mr Skripal, specifically by the application of the nerve agent to the handle of his front door.

      The first two claims have been expressly made by Her Majesty’s Government, whilst the third one has expressly been made by those in charge of the investigation.

      There are of course other sub-claims that form a part of this (such as the day that Yulia and then Sergei were discharged from hospital) but these three claims are substantially it.

      The main problem with the first claim is that the Skripals are alive and well. The main problem with the second is Russia is absolutely not the only country or entity that could have produced the alleged substance. And the main problem with the third claim is that it is a physical impossibility that 2 people could have come into contact with the alleged substance, and then collapsed at exactly the same time 4 hours later.

      Everything else follows from those three basic, but demonstrably false claims.

      1. Aren’t ” those in charge of the investigation” the only ones authorized to make “official statements”?

      2. I agree with you completely, Rob, except for you saying that the Skripals are ‘alive and well’. In truth, we can’t be sure of this. All we know for certain is that Yulya was alive at the time the Reuters video was recorded.

      3. Rob,

        I have tried two PCs and my phone, but since yesterday I have not been able to post a new post.
        I usually write it as a doc, then paste it.
        If this is published, then the Reply part works, but not when I paste to it.
        Any thoughts on how to fix it?
        It was working that way until Sunday when the van appeared at my driveway.

        1. It’ll be the van Duncan. Tell them to clear off.

          Seriously though, I don’t know why this is happening. It all started to go a bit wrong when I tried to include the plugin to post images with content. Big mistake. At least this latest post posted. Try again and if it’s still not letting you paste and post, I’ll take a look.

      4. Hi Rob,

        I definitely agree with you. Almost nothing is “official” except that Putin did it (whatever it was).

        On your Point 3, what do we make of this post by CharlieFreak…?
        I was discussing the ‘door handle’ theory with a relative about five or six weeks ago and he was telling me that he had been listening to a BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ interview with a Govt Security Minister the previous week (Ben Wallace?) in which he was asked if Novichok residue had actually been found by investigators on the door handle. According to my relative – who has been following the case and assumed from all the publicity that nerve agent residue had been found on the door handle – the Minister said it hadn’t but it was a plausible the theory they were working with. As I understand it the interviewer then rhetorically remarked (without any obvious hint of irony or incredulity) that presumably it was quite possible that the ‘assassins’ came back after seeing the Skripals leave the house and wiped the door handle clean to remove the evidence!!
        https://www.theblogmire.com/bbc-crimewatch-reconstruction-of-salisbury-poisonings-shelved/#comment-8643

        Can this be? Not even the door handle is “official”…???

    3. john_a,
      “Is the “perfume bottle” official for example?”

      Officially the Novichok was found in a “small glass bottle” in Charlie Rowley’s flat. No further details were officially given about the container. It was Charlie who said that he had found a perfume bottle with a known brand name, which Dawn sprayed on her wrists, and that the contents somehow got onto Charlie’s hands.

    4. – “Or the novichok in the public toilets?”

      Nothing official as far as I know, except that the Hazmat guys searched the public toilets in QEM park. Some tabloid published a ludicrous story about Russia using that public toilet as a CW lab.

    5. – “Is there really a police timeline that one can look up in any official source, or is it just another media story?”

      The Metropolitan Police published a timeline a number of times.
      http://news.met.police.uk/news/update-incident-in-salisbury-298351
      http://news.met.police.uk/news/renewed-appeal-for-information-from-anyone-who-saw-salisbury-victims-car-298912
      http://news.met.police.uk/news/ongoing-investigation-into-incident-in-salisbury-on-4-march-309256

      This has been said many times before, but it’s worth repeating that the police did not say when the Skripals visited the Mill pub, only that it was “at some time after” they arrived at Sainsbury’s car park in Salisbury city centre. The police must have known more about the exact timing, since they had plenty of timestamped CCTV footage available to them. ‘Unofficially’ according to media reports, they went to Mill before they went to Zizzis, but there does not appear to be anything to support that version of events.

    6. – “Most recently the fact (?) was reported – apparently as a Guardian exclusive – that the government is “poised” (whatever that means) to submit an extradition request to Moscow. If true, it would be a very serious act. Has it been officially documented, or is even this simply another media story?”

      I guess that this is the story that originated from the Press Association that the Russian assassins were identified from CCTV images. Nothing official about that, in fact the Security Minister called it “ill informed and wild speculation”. However, the BBC has treated the report very seriously.
      https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536
      https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43643025

      If the BBC continues to say that, it must have been leaked from some senior official source that wants the public to believe it, even if that source does not commit to it publicly.

    7. – You ask in another post “Not even the door handle is “official”…???”

      The British authorities have not explicitly stated that the Novichok was found on the door knob, only on the front door: “Specialists have identified the highest concentration of the nerve agent, to-date, as being on the front door of the address.”.

      However, there have been various media reports that the nerve agent was found on the door handle. Furthermore, Sir Mark Sedwill, the UK’s national security adviser stated in a publicly released letter that Russia had previously tested the use of door handles as a way of delivering nerve agents.

      1. Sedwill says “DSTL established that the highest concentrations were found on the handle of Mr Skripal’s front door. These are matters of fact.” So I suppose you could call that official.

  25. My thesis: The Skripals did not walk through the Market Walk to the bench.
    I want to substantiate this thesis:

    We have two CCTVs of people that are NOT the Skripals :
    15:47:43 Snap Fitness shows the couple with the red bag. First published on March 6.
    Cain Prince, 28, runs Snap Fitness.
    16:08:00 Jenny’s restaurant shows three people. First published on March 9.
    Mustafa Dalangal, 57, runs Jenny’s restaurant .

    How did these two CCTVs find their way into the public ?
    We know that the police didn´t publish a single CCTV. Why should they release this two ?
    No, it were some journalists who found the CCTV earlier than the police.

    Look at this timeline of March 5 and 6 (Reporter Liam Trim) :
    Monday March 5
    6pm The BBC reports the man is Sergei Skripal, 66, an ex-military intelligence colonel who was convicted in Russia of passing state secrets to Britain
    7pm At a press conference Temporary Assistant Chief Constable Craig Holden tells reporters it is not being treated as a counter-terror incident.
    Tuesday March 6
    09:07 The BBC named Skripal as the man who was found along with a woman in her 30s, believed to be known to him, on a bench near a shopping centre shortly after 4pm on Sunday.
    09:37 Both supermarkets are open but there are national media providing coverage close to the police tape.
    10:34 Sergei Skripal, 66, was found slumped on a bench in Salisbury alongside a 33-year-old woman, who the BBC understands is his daughter, Yulia Skripal.
    10:53 The latest from the Press Association: „As CCTV believed to show the pair in the moments before they were found slumped on a bench emerged, the UK’s top counter-terrorism officer, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, said: “We have to be alive to the fact of state threats.”
    10:56 Freya Church, 27, the gym worker, from Salisbury, told the Press Association: (..)
    15:37 BBC home affairs correspondent sums up press conference
    He’s quite brutally frank here but it’s true – we did not learn much from that press conference.
    https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/salisbury-russian-spy-police-substance-1302045

    I guess that Craig Holden in the evening of March 5 told reporters about a man in his 60th and a woman in her 30th were the couple found slumped on the bench. And I suspect he also mentioned the red bag.
    This gave the Press Association the idea to look for the couple on private CCTVs.
    PA was looking for a couple with a red bag and they found it at Snap Fitness.

    We know for a fact that PA found the wrong pair.
    Had there been another couple on the CCTV with a red bag, then they would certainly have copied it, too ! So there was no second pair with a red bag in Market Walk at that time !

    Later on March 6 the police arrived at Snap Fitness :
    Quote : Snap Fitness manager Cain Prince, aged 28, said: “Police had a good look at the footage and were interested in these two people. It was the only image they took away.“
    Mr Prince added that police said Skripal was “wearing a green coat”. [End quote]

    “Police had a good look at the footage“ – so, the police too didn´t see the Skripals in market Walk !
    But they found it suspicious that there was a couple who also had a red bag. So they took it away.

    The same with Jenny’s restaurant CCTV on March 9.
    First the CCTV was discovered by The Sun.
    Police came later :
    Quote : Counter terror cops from SO15 Special Operations have seized new CCTV footage that shows two people who fit the description of the victims.
    Cops seized the pictures from a local business yesterday (Fri) – two days after the proprietor told them he had it.
    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5767001/cctv-video-ex-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-daughter-yulia-walking-mystery-woman-before-poisoned/

    The Sun knew about the Snap Fitness CCTV and the red bag. Why did they focus on another couple ? Was the red bag couple not on Jenny’s restaurant CCTV ? But they can not have fallen from the sky. I have no logical explanation other than this : Certain media wanted to create the illusion that the Skripals walked the Market Walk, although they didn´t.

    Conclusion : Two different reporters have spotted CCTV. But no one has discovered the Skripals. In short, the Skripals didn´t walk through the Market Walk.

    1. Liane, I think you are right. And why did the police take away that image from Snap Fitness? Because it was the couple on the bench! When the police searched the CCTV they knew what the bench couple looked like… and that was who they were looking for.

      If it had been the real Skripals on the bench, why on earth would the police have taken away CCTV of a random couple with a red bag, yet not bothered to take any images of the Skripals?

      “Yes Mr Cain, Mr Skripal was wearing a green coat but never mind about that; I think I will have this picture of these two other people if that’s alright with you.”

      1. Another thought, this may explain the switch in the Mill/Zizzi or Zizzi/Mill timeline. The CCTV couple were clearly not coming from the direction of the Mill, they were coming from Zizzi.

        As the police had made a mistake in releasing the CCTV image, they may have switched the story round and said it was the Mill first to cover up the fact that they had (ridiculously) issued a CCTV image of 2 otherwise random people coming from the wrong direction. By switching it round perhaps they thought it provided some cover for having issued images of people that were not the Skripals… and left the idea in everyone’s mind that the Skripals had come from the same direction.

        1. Paul, both CCTVs were NOT released by the police but by the press !
          This fact forced them to change the story.
          Why on earth was the time when the Skripals were in Mill Pub never given, neither by police nor journalists ?

          1. Something very significant happened in the Mill

            It had 12 CCTV cameras operating that day the recordings were all seized by the police

            The Manager was was treated as a terror suspect and interviewed by police 8 times in the first week of the investigation.

            The Skripals went to the Mill before Zizzis

            “As further details of Col Skripal’s movements emerged, a source close to Greg Townsend, manager of The Mill, revealed that he served the Russians last Sunday afternoon and had since been treated like a “terror suspect”, interviewed by police up to eight times last week.

            He said The Mill had 12 CCTV cameras, covering the large open-plan bar area as well as the upstairs balcony and lavatories overlooking it.

            “The pub has obviously remained closed for more than a week and the cordon widened, but Greg feels like he has been kept completely in the dark, they’re not telling him anything.

            “He actually served them. He’s had a bit of a time of it all and is a pending terror suspect.

            “He certainly said he’s being treated like one. He’s had around eight police interviews.””

            https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/13/salisbury-car-park-ticket-machine-cordoned-expert-warns-dusty/

            1. Sorry the Telegraph has the opposite to the “Official Narrative” (as it was then)

              “From the car park, it was just a short walk through The Maltings shopping precinct to Zizzi, where they ate lunch before heading to The Mill pub for a drink.”

              The “Official Narrative” was never changed on Dr Davies, the Duck Boys park location, the cctv pair being one and the same as the bench people

              And the Helicopter taking Yuia and / or Sergie changed 3 weeks l was corrected later in the leading MSM news provider the Spire FM website.

              The Official Narrative is a tool of the Hoaxer and because of its unreliability it means Pants.

              Independent Tested Evidence is what is forming the Facts, if they are false they can easily be refuted abd corrected by New Evidence eg Mill and Council CCTV

              1. This is a Major Witness but the Official Narrative has forgotten about her

                “The source said the CCTV cameras covered the whole bar and had been seized by police.

                “Skripal and his daughter sat just to the right of the front door.

                “One of the young bar staff who was on a break sat really near them and has also been interviewed.””

                1. Sorry both the “Source” and “One of the young bar staff”

                  Are Major witnesses.

                  So is Mill Manager Greg Townsend .

                  Lots of witnesses dropped out of the “Official Narrative” did they know the wrong type of stuff?

                  It’s a HOAX !

                  I Will start to put a list of the elements of the Hoax together at the top.

            2. Peter, this prompted me to look at Mr Townend’s Facebook page and there was a link to a piece about his rabbits, which were locked up behind the police cordon, with no food or water. But thanks to his raising of awareness on social media, the police stepped in:

              “Luckily, the Luckily, Wiltshire Police stepped into the rescue the rabbits after pub manager’s plea was shared more than 100 times across Facebook. The force today tweeted: ‘We have an update on the rabbits stuck at an address in one of [the] cordons. They have now been given food and water and are OK. Thanks for everyone’s concern.'”

              http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5485721/Race-save-floppy-eared-Salisbury-two.html

              Sadly the cat and the guinea pigs at 47 Christie Miller Road were not treated with the same care. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” it seems.

              1. Or, possibly, ‘all police are dumb, but some are dumber than others’.

                Or, one could change ‘dumb’ to ‘unfeeling’, or ‘callous’, or some other derogatory term.

                The cat and the guinea pigs in the Skripal’s house would have been raising hell and the cat would have been trying everything in its repertoire to get out. Then there’s the defecation and urination, the smell must have been quite ripe. So please tell me how the officers posted outside the Skripals and Townsend’s ignored all this without comment to their superiors?

                1. No idea. The two things that baffle me about the whole incident are:

                  a) If you look at the photos of police officers standing near the house, there are three windows that are open. I would have thought the cat could have got through one of those, and there’s probably a catflap on the back door. The cat, if not the guinea pigs, could surely have gotten away.

                  b) Why on earth the authorities let on about the condition of the animals. They’re not above being economical with the actualite. Why then did they not just say, “The cat and the guinea pigs are now safely residing at a secure location. They do not wish to avail themselves of the services of the RSPA, or Russian Embassy, and they ask that their privacy be respected.”

                  Bizarre, no???

                2. The affair of the pets was only made public when the Russian embassy began enquiring about them. Until then it was the Skripals’ vet who’d contacted the police about the pets, and this happened within hours of the poisoning.

                  Once it became public, the government had to come up with a plausible cover story – claiming that DSB had found them on 4th March. I don’t believe this. The DEFRA vet allegedly involved was, as far as I know, never named, and the best they could come up with was that the Persian cat, Nash van Drake (brought over from Russia), had been found in a ‘distressed’ state, taken to PD, humanely put to sleep and incinerated. No vet should euthanise an animal simply because it is distressed. The guinea pigs (also from Russia) had been found dead due to lack of food and water were also taken off to PD. I don’t believe this story. Rumours of a second cat, Masyanya, bought in England, began to circulate and it was assumed that this cat had escaped. Neighbours will know more.

                  I would like to think that all the pets survived and are now safe. This may even be true if the Skripals had been ‘disappeared’ according to a pre-planned operation. If so, the pets would have been moved elsewhere shortly before the fateful day, or on that very morning.

                  HMG hadn’t taken into account a second cat, because they weren’t aware of one, but there certainly were two cats and I have videos of them both. The embassy were only aware of one cat and two guinea pigs, information that I believe came from Viktoria. As for the rabbits and fish, another later rumour, perhaps they had been taken away earlier too. The whole pet story strikes me as very odd. Maybe Howard Taylor, the vet, knows more than we do. He said, “We phoned the police on day one to offer to help if they needed it. I thought it unlikely the police would have gone to the house and not done anything.”

                  On 17th March it was only reported that the animals had been taken away. It was only on 6/7th April that HMG admitted that the guinea pigs were dead and the had been suffering.

                  According to The Sun: Taylor said of Mr Skripal: “He was a nice chap and we got on well. He never said he was in fear for his life. He used the vets for some years and I had seen his cat and his guinea pigs.” Note: only one cat mentioned.

                  “We contacted the police straightaway upon hearing the news that Mr Skripal had been admitted to hospital, and a number of times afterwards, to make them aware of Mr Skripal’s pets and their needs.
                  We contacted Porton Down – in case the animals may have been taken into isolation. We also offered to take care of Mr Skripal’s pets in his absence. We were never contacted by the police or Porton Down in return regarding Mr Skripal’s pets”.

                  If we believe this official story, then why haven’t the RSPCA prosecuted the police fotr animal neglect? I’m disgusted by the RSPCA’s apparent lack of interest in this affair. Their press officer, Nicola Walker said:

                  “It is very sad to hear that these animals have died in such tragic circumstances. However, we appreciate the emergency services were working in extreme and dangerous conditions in an incredibly fast-moving operation in an attempt to keep the public safe. We don’t currently know the details of what happened but, as part of our ongoing working relationship with police, we would like to see if there is any learning for future operations.”

                  Suzanne Norbury, their South-West Press Officer came up with the same wording, and:
                  “Emergency services … working in extreme and dangerous conditions … incredibly fast-moving operation … an attempt to keep the public safe’…

                  I go along with this assessment: “It’s a string of shallow excuses. It’s nonsense. And it comes, not from the police themselves, but from the royal body supposed to prevent cruelty to animals”.

              2. According to one press report the pets were already removed from Skripal’s house on 17 March…
                https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/17/poisoned-russian-agents-cat-guinea-pigs-taken-away-tests-7394516/

                This report may have been inaccurate, but nobody can claim that the existence of the pets was not known as early as mid March. The family vet also raised questions at an early stage. The report also shows that somebody thought the animals were worth “testing”.

                To me, this is one of the most bizarre inconsistencies in the whole case. Were the animals removed in mid March (alive) or early April (dead)? Why are there two different and mutually contradictory stories? What possible interest could be served by leaving the pets inside the house? And does it really mean that the police or counter-terror guys never entered the house before early April? After (supposedly) finding novichok on the door handle?

                What’s going on here? Did somebody calculate that a heartbreak story about starving pets would make us all hate Russia even more? If so, I suspect it backfired badly. British people love pets, and the story really just makes the British authorities look inhuman. Especially because it was the Russians who raised the issue.

                Or is the whole sorry saga of the pets just a symptom of the British authorities losing interest in the whole affair and just trying to walk away from it in embarrassment?

                Also, do the Skripals know the fate of their pets? What have they been told, and how did they take it?

              3. As I wrote before, it looks like a punishment of Sergei. He really loved his pets.
                Or does anybody here has the impression, that the Skripals were treated like innocent victims ?

  26. With regard to the Amesbury case:
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wiltshire-salisbury-amesbury-major-incident-victims-dawn-sturgess-charlie-rowley-latest-a8431376.html
    An excerpt:
    A specialist “decontamination shower” was taken to the scene [Rowley’s place] by Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service on Saturday [30 June], but a crew from Swindon later tweeted that “thankfully the incident wasn’t serious and our decontamination shower wasn’t required”. The tweet has since been deleted.

  27. Call out for any Heraldry buffs or inspired insights

    What do these crests signify?

    They belong to the human poisoning research facility in Salisbury

      1. The shield first because it is the easy one:

        A shield with engrailed chevron and 3 torches.

        The shield (or escutcheon) is usually just a background but it was also a means of identifying friend or foe.

        The chevron is a roof (directly from the French rafter/roof) it symbolises protection, or someone who has performed an act of faithful service.

        The engrailed edges symbolise earth or land (engrailed means semi-circles that meet at points).

        The torches consist of twisted hemp soaked in oil, and set in a holder; they symbolise light or the bringer of light.

        The dragon passant atop a crown(?) – I’m struggling a bit here because the lower symbol is not clear.

        The dragon (4 legs) passant (standing on 3 legs) is a symbol of power or protection; a brave or valiant defender of treasure. The crown (if it is a crown) is the symbol of the sovereign.

        The colours also have meaning if you know what they are.

        1. Sterling work as always Paul, thank you.

          The note was sent from Frank Beswick (no relation) to Dr David Kelly the week before he died.

          Beswick was a colleague of Kelly’s at Porton Down

          Sorry I only have the B & W image

        2. Peter, I didn’t like the idea of a crown and when I looked again, I think the dragon is standing on land and beneath the land is a rope (that is the damaged part of the image). In that case, the rope symbolises the sea and the land becomes an island.

          So the whole image is a brave and valiant defender of an island.

      2. I happen to be a heraldry obsessive!

        The first one is a crest, in other words, part a complete heraldic ‘achievement’ of arms. It cannot, on its own, identify a family.

        That dragon is a very close representation of the Welsh dragon: a dragon passant – presumably gules (red). He is standing on a chapeau gules (‘cap of maintenance’) instead of the more usual ‘torse’ (wreath) made up of two furs (instead of the usual ermine), probably intended to be ermine and sable – I’ve never seen this before. The presence of this cap is a special honour and means that the bearer has been **granted royal privilege**.

        The arms on the right could be described as say, “azure chevron engraily or three torches proper”. I’ve made up the colours here – blue field, yellow engrailed chevron, three torches as in real life – for I can’t see them. Drawing any inference from the symbolism of heraldic charges (the devices shown in the ‘field’) is very risky. They could mean many things, and can even act as puns on a name, or the original pronunciation of a name.

        Even with a lot of hard work, the arms cannot be identified with a family without knowing the ‘tinctures’ (colours) used. Presumably the crest on the left is that of the full achievement (not shown) containing the arms on the right.

        1. The writer of the letter was Frank Beswick (no relation) to Dr david Kelly, I don’t know whether it was his own letter header (the crest and coat of arms) or that of the CDE Porton Down but this seems to indicate it was his own personal crest & Arms

          “Frank’s scientific work did not interfere with his enthusiasm for voluntary work with the St John Ambulance, in which he was a senior figure. The promotion to the rank of commander brother within the Order of St John in 1995 delighted him and allowed him to design his own coat of arms. This included the badge of the Chemical Defence Establishment and a heart, a nod back to his early work in cardiac physiology.”

          I Hadn’t realised before but Beswick and Kelly had worked on detoxing the island of Gruinard together

          “In 1979, following the closure of the Microbiological Research Establishment, the small microbiology programme fell into his bailiwick and this stimulated the work to rehabilitate the Island of Gruinard, which had been contaminated with anthrax in the early 1940s.”

          https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d6425

            1. Well, there’s no heart in the arms on that letterhead so I can’t see how they can be the arms that Beswick chose for himself. Nor do I understand why the crest is placed separately on the left. It’s only the colour and charges in the escutcheon (shield) that makes a coat-of-arms unique to a particular family, individual or corporate body. In a sense, the rest is mere traditional ornament – the supporters, crest, helm, motto…

              Yes, I saw that Hasbrouck one when I did a quick search, but the chevron is not engrailed and the difference is crucial. It MUST be engrailed (the internet is still not the best way to search for these things). By the way the Hasbouck arms would is described as “Purpure, a chevron between three flambeaus or, flamed proper”, so our friend’s arms would then be:

              “????, a chevron engrailed between three flambeaus (not torches) or (probably), flamed proper (probably)”. I can’t guess the field colour (????), and I’m guessing the likely colours of the torches.

  28. I had forgotten about Ross Cassidy and was checking him out again after Miheila mentioned him for the list of people who know more that they are saying and found this from Sky News March 28 2018

    Mr Cassidy, 61, has spent many hours with counter-terror detectives investigating the poisoning, but would not discuss the police operation.

    Mr Cassidy got to know Sergei, his wife Lyudmila, his son Alexandr (who was known as Sasha) and Yulia.

    Sergei spent a lot of time out of the country and there were times when I didn’t see him, but he used to call me his English friend. He was very generous and never forgot my birthday, usually buying me an expensive bottle of whisky.

    On Saturday 3 March, Mr Cassidy drove Mr Skripal to Heathrow to collect Yulia, who had moved back to Moscow and was visiting her father. It had been snowing and Sergei asked his pal if they could use his four-wheel-drive pick-up truck.

    Last week, in a court ruling about the Skripals’ medical needs, a judge quoted the consultant treating them in Salisbury district hospital: “The hospital has not been approached by anyone known to the patients to enquire of their welfare.”

    Mr Cassidy was upset by the suggestion there wasn’t anyone who cared enough to want to go and see the Skripals.

    He said: “That is misinformation, because we care. I asked the police several times if we could go and see them, quietly and away from the media, but I was told quite categorically that we were not allowed. We asked the question and the answer was ‘no’.

    “We were also upset that if his family and friends in Russia got to hear about this lack of concern it would cause them extra anguish.”

    My questions:

    Why wouldn’t Ross Cassidy discuss the police operation?

    Why wouldn’t the police let Sergei’s best friend in England, visit him in hospital?

    Did the SDH consultant know that the police were preventing Sergei and Yulia from having visitors?

    If the SDH consultant did know that, then why didn’t he tell the judge that?

    I’ve shortened the story. Here’s the link:
    https://news.sky.com/story/salisbury-nerve-agent-attack-sergei-skripal-and-daughter-yulia-should-be-allowed-to-die-11306692

    1. Hi Denise,

      I’m glad you picked up on his name.
      I included him, because outside the spook community, he’s the only person in England who appears to have known the Skripal family well – all four. No wonder he was questioned for so long.

      I’ll try to answer your questions as I see the situation. Just my opinion.

      1.Why wouldn’t Ross Cassidy discuss the police operation?

      Because he’d been threatened with dire consequences if he did. Whatever they were, they were most likely fabricated. ‘National interest’ springs to mind as the justification.

      2. Why wouldn’t the police let Sergei’s best friend in England, visit him in hospital?

      Either because he wasn’t there or because – later- they were afraid that Sergei would speak. I suspect he was never there at all.

      3. Did the SDH consultant know that the police were preventing Sergei and Yulia from having visitors?

      Probably none of the SDH staff did.

      4. If the SDH consultant did know that, then why didn’t he tell the judge that?

      SDH declined to be represented in court due to feeling ‘uncomfortable’. As I said in an earlier post, whoever that unnamed doctor was, he/she was ‘highly unlikely’ to be from SDH, but was rather an MoD ‘specialist’ brought in from elsewhere – PD or a military hospital.

      Ross Cassidy may not have been willing to talk to the media, but I’m sure he said more to family and friends. Perhaps he’d be willing to talk to an impartial investigator, but then he might be too afraid of the consequences – which could have been direct threats to him or his family.

      He needs to be asked about police activity and visitors at the Skripals, Sergei’s pets (including the alleged rabbits and fish, not to mention Manyúnya, the cat who allegedly escaped), any concerns he may have had leading up to the fateful day, and so much more.

      1. 2. Why wouldn’t the police let Sergei’s best friend in England, visit him in hospital?

        In the US and absent a signed directive by a patient that’s either unconscious or incompetent, only next of kin are allowed to visit the patient. So, it would be the hospital that denies a friend access to a patient. No need for police involvement on this matter in this case.

        The police, naturally, were looking for information on the patients and at any conceivable culprits. A double whammy for Cassidy.

        1. According to Ross Casssidy, it was the police who told him that he wasn’t allowed to visit Sergei. Have they any right to do this? If conscious and talking, Sergei could ask to see any visitor he liked, but this didn’t happen – either because he wasn’t there, didn’t ask, had no friends or because friends had been prohibited from visiting. We know RC had tried to, but without success.

          In normal circumstances a hospital wouldn’t be prohibiting visitors. Presumably RC had no means of contacting Sergei by phone either, and vice versa. As far as we know, Sergei has been kept incommunicado ever since 4th March, if indeed he is still alive. A very worrying situation.

          1. According to Ross Casssidy, it was the police who told him that he wasn’t allowed to visit Sergei. Have they any right to do this?

            Cassidy’s Sky News interview was published on 3/28; so, his interview took place on or before 3/28. As of that date, both Yulia and Sergei were officially unconscious or not able to communicate meaningfully. At the direction of a hospital or for other reasons determined by law enforcement, police do have that right.

            Also, we don’t have any idea if at any time Yulia and/or Sergei requested to see Cassidy.

            1. I see now. As you say the Skripals (or ‘bench people’) were still officially unconscious at that time, so it would make sense that no visitors were allowed.

              If the Skripals were there and after they had regained consciousness, it’s surely likely that they would have wanted visitors, especially a visit from Ross Cassidy, Sergei’s best friend. But I’m pretty certain that the authorities would have prevented this at all costs, hence the lack of phone access and Cassidy’s remarks.

                1. These exchanges about whether friends were allowed to visit the Skripals in hospital inspired me to refresh my memories of the gross deception of HMG regarding whether the Skripals had any relatives in Russia. At the High Court ruling by Mr Justice Williams on 22 March, granting permission to provide the OPCW with samples, he stated “Given the absence of any contact having been made with the NHS Trust by any family member and the limited evidence as to the possible existence of family members in Russia, I accept that it is neither practicable nor appropriate in the special context of this case to consult with any relatives [of the Skripals] who might fall into the category identified in s.4(7)(b) of the Act”. (‘The Act’ being the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and s.4(7)(b) states that before delivering what is in an incapacitated person’s best interests the person ruling (in this case Mr Justice Williams) must: take into account, in order to consult them, the views of anyone engaged in caring for the person or INTERESTED IN HIS WELFARE”). (my emphasis).
                  This statement was delivered in spite of the fact that the Sun had carried an interview with Viktoria Skripal on 14 March about her concerns and desire to visit/make contact with the Skripals. And in spite of the fact that the Russian Embassy have records that on 6 March “the Embassy informed the FCO of the request it had received from Viktoria Skripal to provide information on the condition of her relatives. https://rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/6481

                  1. Apologies for the misplacement of a couple of quotation marks in the above post. I usually intend to proof read what I have written before sending but didn’t on this occasion as I am conscious that if I exceed a certain period of time composing my message (I haven’t worked out what the time limit is) the system refuses to post it and I have to start again. That aside, I think my meaning is clear.

              2. family

                Friends do not enjoy the same privileges to visit patients in hospital as family does.

                (This has been a huge factor in why same-sex marriage was so necessary.)

        2. Quote : The colonel’s close friend Ross Cassidy, who lives just a few doors from the property the Russian rented when he first arrived in Salisbury, said he “was not at liberty to talk.”
          He declined to say whether his friend had spoken of fears for his life, adding: “It’s a very sensitive investigation of some gravitas. I really am unable to divulge any information at the moment.”
          https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/06/did-treacherous-past-russian-colonel-finally-catch-salisbury/

          I agree with you that Cassidy knows more, but is forbidden to talk about.

      2. I will reply to this, but simply as a test as I can’t seem to post this afternoon,
        Maybe Rob is doing some site maintenance.

        I do not think SDH were involved in bad practices. The Terror Team and PD took over.
        In fact going to the courts for the second blood sample might have been required due to SDH “resistance”.
        Anyone else with posting issues?
        If I see that you are posting then it must be my PC or possibly the big van with a dish on the roof at the end of my street.

  29. A some point people stopped trying to prove the Earth was an irregular ball shape thing and was spinning around, doing laps of our nearest star at close on 66k mph.

    They didn’t stop because it wasn’t true, it had just been proven beyond doubt and there was other stuff to get on with.

    Flat Earthers did come along, many having their own reasons, some just didn’t want to believe we were on a ball floating in space and prefer to live with the idea that we live on a gurt plate.

    The Hoax has been proven, the motive is not the most important feature, murderers go to jail whether their motives are known or not.

    The most important thing is to identify who was responsible for Dawn Sturgess’ death and bring them to Justice along with those that have attempted to cover up the wicked and depraved crime.

    The motives may or may not flow from that process but it is rather academic at the moment to say the least.

    Those responsible for Dawn’s death are also responsible for the cover up of the Salisbury Incident. That is what led to Dawn’s death.

    People responsible include

    Mrs May and some of her Ministers

    Salisbury and Met Police Chiefs.

    These are not wild “Conspiracy Theories”. They are cold, hard facts. And we have the proof that will convict. Beyond reasonable doubt proof that those people I have mentioned above are involved in the death of Dawn Surgess and the cover up of the Salisbury and Amesbury Incidents.

    1. Whenever governments bury facts, they are never up to any good. History is full of examples of facts been hidden and whenever the lid is finally raised, it is was never for a good reason:
      Vietnam war
      JFK
      Iraq WMD
      etc
      etc

      The problem for TPTB this time is that they are in a different class to prior events – they are completely incompetent, utterly useless, self-important fools… and obvious liars. This is what ‘equal opportunity’ hiring does! The good liars are gone.

      Just look at all the ‘officials’ involved and wonder how they ever came to get the job…

      I continue to believe that this saga was the reason for Johnson’s resignation. He could have survived May’s Chequers debacle but he knows this story will ruin the rest of his career, so he has done a runner. He will get as much distance betwen himself and these events as he possibly can.

      1. Paul,
        Once again, I agree with everything you say.

        Digressing to a different topic, it is the sheer “incompetence etc etc” that also explains the shambles that is ‘Brexit’. And these incompetents – as I have alluded to elsewhere – are these days supported by many incompetent civil servants. I could see the way things were heading many years ago and that was one of my reasons for leaving the civil service 15 years ago after more than 20 years service in the company of many intelligent and honourable civil servants who were gradually retiring and were also expressing concerns about the deterioration in standards at all levels. I saw the rot begin when, about 20 years ago, the civil service opened up vacancies at all levels of responsibility to people with administrative or managerial experience but not civil service experience, so they hadn’t acquired the ability to work alongside and in conjunction with legal advisers or technical experts (e.g. in my case, veterinarians and structural engineers at different times) which is an ability that develops and improves over an extended period of time and is integral to the successful functioning of the CS. When I joined the CS you would attend meetings and observe how such relationships developed and were used to achieve the intended aim many years before you yourself might find yourself having to do it. That no longer happens – people are just thrown in at the deep end, managed by incompetent staff and told to get on with it, with nobody providing knowledge-based ‘quality control’. Whether or not you are a ‘Remainer’ or a ‘Brexiteer’ in principle, there was no hope for negotiations from the outset with the useless shower that we have in power (scope for a limerick there!). The Brexit considerations and negotiations have been in the hands of pathetic amateurs who are at sixes and sevens and who, after so many decades of relying on the EU to tell them what to do, have completely foregone any ability to think for themselves. That is the key problem, not the principle of Brexit, which could have resulted in far more encouraging prospects had it been in the right hands.
        CF

        1. It didn’t happen by apathy, stupidity or accident it happened by design.

          The people that control our politicians and civil / public servants don’t want troublesome people that can actually think or care

          1. Peter,
            Exactly – one quality I found to be completely absent in ‘newcomers’ was initiative. I inherited someone at middle management level who had been in that particular policy job for about a year. I routinely asked him to draft a straightforward (but not ‘standard’) letter for one of our Ministers to send to an MP answering questions raised by a constituent about aspects of our Department’s legislation. After all, that was part of his job description. As a middle manager responsible for that policy area he and even his subordinate officer should be able to quote chapter and verse and why it had been formulated in the way it had (e.g. ‘based on Article X of EU Council Directive ABC’); at the very least he should have been able to work out the answers from information to hand or by consulting expert colleagues. We had been given the standard week or so to produce the draft reply which I could have knocked up in a couple of hours at most. So when I hadn’t been given the draft for clearance by the morning of the required day and asked him about it he told me I had been unreasonable to ask him to do it without telling him what he needed to say! Needless to say, I knocked up the reply in a couple of hours but had to forego other tasks I was supposed to do that afternoon. When I joined the CS a Clerical Officer (2 grades below this chap) would have been asked to provide a first draft. I could bore you with other examples…but, you’ll be pleased to hear,I won’t. Unfortunately that level of intellect is all too common nowadays.

        2. Charlie, You hit that nail very firmly, right on the head!

          I have seen it myself. Not only have standards dropped but wherever you look, people just don’t care anymore. Second rate is now ‘good enough’.

        3. Charlie, you’ve described an operational organizational change that isn’t limited to public institutions. It exists in corporations as well and began to take hold about thirty years ago. Instead of promoting from within line staff – those who had spent years doing and moved up slowly in managerial positions as they demonstrated management skills – into the managerial ranks, the concept of ‘universal manager’ gained a foothold. As if managerial skills are a special talent and nothing more is required to manage any operation. In the US, business and government had to absorb all those newly minted MBAs and those people weren’t about to start at the bottom of the operational ladder.

          The two best managers I ever had the pleasure to work for didn’t complete an undergrad college degree. Yes, they did have people skills but they were also solid in their line technical skills as well. Highly respected by employees, colleagues, and in the industry. They had a firm grasp of the skill-sets of their employees, how trustworthy each of their employees were, and were immune to the sycophants.

          1. Marie
            Another change in infrastructure policy that had dire consequences and contributed to the problems you refer to was the principle that ‘no one could be deemed a failure or to not have the aptitude to succeed with the appropriate training’. When I began my CS employment the annual report procedure was quite emphatic and honest about abilities. As a manager there was a range of five graded boxes you could tick against all aspects of performance, the lowest of which was ‘not good enough’, and, if repeated, this could warrant a warning from personnel (sorry, ‘human resources’ now) and potentially demotion. There was also a box where the manager had to enter what grade they thought the member of staff would have the inherent capability of achieving by the end of their career! For many people of all ages this was often the grade they were in at the time but they were realistic and honest enough to accept that it was probably right. It’s arguable whether this last box served a positive purpose for the majority of staff but, rightly or wrongly, the intention was to motivate the best staff to continue in the CS rather than become despondent and quit. It was decided by forward thinking, liberal minded individuals many years ago now that annual reports should never say anything negative, and if anything negative needed to be said then the line management must be at fault for not overcoming their staff member’s deficiencies.

            1. I could go on and on about how the check-box/list employee appraisal forms are a blight, but primarily they retard the development of good, everyday managerial skills.

              Annual reports are sales pitches to investors — probably always have been. SEC filings are more useful, but not as much so as in the past when the SEC was serious of its charge.

        4. We need a history lesson to put the civil service in context.
          In 1900, the certain method for someone from the working class to improve their situation was to become a teacher or a civil servant. The examination for the civil service was horrendously difficult.

          In 1900, we had 50,000 civil servants to run central and local government (and we ran an empire!). There were no computers then.

          All the details in the following link from the HL hansard (after marker 1657).

          https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1980/may/07/central-and-local-government

          1. George,
            Yep. Another problem we are creating for the future – although the Govt will welcome this ‘problem’ – is that in ‘the good old days’ and up until the 1990s EVERY single official communication whether written or verbal had to be recorded on a single officially registered uniquely numbered registry file. Each file, where documents and ‘minutes’ were sequentially numbered in date order, expanded to about 2.5″ thick and some subjects would have multiple A,B, C… etc files. If someone in Office A sent a note to someone in Office B about a Govt issue it was obligatory to send a paper photocopy (or carbon copy) to HQ for them to place on the file. Nothing went unrecorded. Even internal discussions between staff would be summarised on a minute sheet afterwards, signed by the staff involved and placed on file. The system had to be run really strictly but it worked and we can look back and identify why certain decisions were made and by whom. But now, with the advent of computers and email the significance of keeping central records has gone and I can guarantee nobody in HQ has a complete historical record of all deliberations and communications. In years to come, conveniently for the Govt, key information about what has been going on in this case and other important matters will be missing.

  30. The motive – creating a rift between the Russian and Western states – is obvious. The perpetrators – including Yulia in the attack for publicity – too.
    It is possible that Skripal was following money laundering via real estate for Christopher Steele and the mafia did not like it.
    But the whole thing was planned for publicity.

    Anybody interested in tax havens and investment ….
    “Perhaps the greatest challenge, with respect to Russia and more generally, concerns the anonymity of global offshore finance. On this front, the US administration would find some cooperation from Moscow. Economically, the Russian treasury has been losing vast sums to offshores. Politically, the Kremlin is keen to strengthen its control over bureaucrats and oligarchs, two groups for whom offshore nest eggs provide an alternative to Putin’s Russia. Since 2013, the Kremlin has pursued a “deoffshorization” campaign encouraging businesses to repatriate capital and stop registering companies offshore; additional legislation has restricted the Russian state employees’ foreign asset
    ownership. A joint US-Russian effort, however limited, at ending the anonymity of corrupt cash flows in Western jurisdictions would serve the interests of both countries.”

    https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=061081024013114025070021112009099014032053053031010004101020097030127019026095077124054054025045018036026018068123094118116000018000070045050020000067096088012001093050076009017065071029007077103075120081103085117022024076098096068006010030031030095031&EXT=pdf

    1. In the interests of accuracy, Simpson has never claimed to have expertise on Russia. His major calling card is the series of investigative articles he wrote on Ukraine, circa 2005-2008, when he was a WSJ reporter. In 2014 or 2015 he was hired by Prevezon, the plaintiff in a UK lawsuit against Browder, and later a defendant in a DOJ lawsuit. When Fusion GPS was hired by the Washington Beacon to do oppo research on Trump, he knew nothing about Trump. It was after the Beacon contract ended and approximately two months after the DNC/HRC campaign hired Fusion and they outsourced the Trump-Russia oppo research to Steele. (Personally, I suspect that Steele had been engaged on this long before then but not by Fusion.)

  32. Dylan Martinez who operated the camera at Yulia’s post-Novihoax debut, and who is described as the chief Reuters photographer for UK and Ireland, has an amusing quote heading his profile page:

    “When editing photos I look for the truth told in the most beautiful way.”

    Yulya Skripal, the embodiment of truth and beauty!

  33. ‘In another curious detail in the filing, the special counsel team said Papadopoulos had been given $10,000 in cash “from a foreign national whom he believed was likely an intelligence officer of a foreign country.” The filing noted that the country was “other than Russia.” ‘ CNN

    Mueller strangely coy about who gave Papa 10k in cash. Was he an Orbis collector too?

    1. UK Government and intelligence all over the place :

      Quote : Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed to have “substantial connections with Russian government officials,” according to prosecutors. Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow where he had learned that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”
      This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York Times describes Mifsud as “an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia” and “a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends,” which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it’s unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud’s intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.
      After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing Trump’s anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud’s tip about Clinton’s emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI. (..)
      In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty. “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?” Halper asked when he got there, but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing.
      https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking-themselves/

      1. “Polonium was chosen as the poison due to its production in Russia, it would implicate Russia”.

        Exactly. Just as ‘Novichok’ was allegedly used in Salisbury, due to it allegedly being developed in Russia (Mirzyanov) – even though it wasn’t actually used against the Skripals at all.

        Maybe this element of the hoax was inspired by Beluga’s use of polonium in the Litvinenko affair.

        1. Miheila, the polonium story always seems crazy to me. It relies on Litvinenko being too mean not to buy his own cup of tea. Hardly a foolproof assassination method.

  34. PAGE 4 OF 4
    This follows a similar pattern to Alexander Litvinenko. Walter Litvinenko, his father, believes Alex received a second dose of agent whilst in hospital. It was a Worlds Apart interview but is now the subject of an Ofcom complaint. Walter said his suspicions were raised by the secrecy of the British government and the fact that they wouldn’t let him see any reports. So he made his own investigations, and from initially thinking it was Russia, he now believes it was the British government. He returned to Russia in fear of his life.

    OPERATION BELUGA

    https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/03/15/operation-beluga-the-plot-to-demonise-putin/

    “Renowned French security expert Paul Barril has let loose a bombshell: the existence of Operation Beluga, a covert Western intelligence scheme intended to undermine Russia and its leaders.”

    The https://www.opednews.com is wrong link, should be:

    http://mirastnews.com/2016/03/operation-beluga-a-us-uk-plot-to-discredit-putin-and-destabilize-the-russian-federation.html

    Renowned French security expert Paul Barril, in an interview, alleges that Berezovsky was working closely with MI6 and the CIA to discredit Russia and Putin, and that large sums from these agencies were passing through Berezovsky’s hands to be paid to individuals to cooperate in these efforts. Barril says Litvinenko was one of Berezovsky’s bag men, who passed funds on to others.

    “Russia has nothing to do with the murder of Litvinenko. The case was fabricated from the beginning. Polonium was chosen as the poison due to its production in Russia, it would implicate Russia. The objective of the whole operation was to discredit president Putin and the FSB. It was done because Russia is blocking US interests around the world, especially in Syria. It was an attempt to weaken Putin’s hold on power, to destabilize Russia.”

    Barril mentions the outspoken Putin foe, financier William Browder, as being in close cooperation with Berezovsky in the discreditation efforts. He also says he is sure Berezovsky was murdered by his secret service handlers after they realized he was behaving erratically and had to be silenced so that he wouldn’t give them away.

  35. PAGE 3 OF 4
    Within 30 minutes (15.47 to 16.15) they are in critical condition. Charlie Rowley describes a similar time-frame for Dawn Sturgess.

    7th March – Scotland Yard Chief Medical Officer statement
    “As your Chief Medical Officer, my message to the public is that this event poses a low risk to us, the public, on the evidence we have.”

    METHOD OF DELIVERY
    Spray: too risky, the assailants run the risk of contaminating themselves. Also the doctor said “There was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal’s face or body”.

    High pressure syringe: the pressure is so great the vaccine (or nerve agent) is pumped through the skin and immediately enters the blood stream. The beauty of this method of delivery is there’s no evidence. I think the assailants grabbed them from behind and delivered the nerve agent directly into the jugular vein, the site of the attack being at the corner of G&T’S. The Skripals wouldn’t have known what had just happened to them.

    DS BAILEY
    DS Bailey will have attended a First-Aid course, so his first action would be to loosen any clothing round Sergei’s neck and clear his airway. If you look at photos of Sergei, he’s got quite a thick neck, so DS Bailey probably had to fiddle a bit with his clothing and this is probably how he was contaminated. He’d unknowingly come into direct contact with a small amount of residue nerve agent at the delivery site.

    ANTON UTKIN former UN Chemical Weapons Expert in Iraq
    Worlds Apart Interview 29th April 2018 – Breaking with Conventions?

    “Why was Novichok agent determined undecomposed only in the blood of Yulia Skripal? It was undecomposed. It’s supposed to be decomposed under the metabolism of the body, but they found undecomposed agent in her blood, but not in the blood of Sergei Skripa, who got heavier exposure to the chemical agent. That was very strange because it is not clear how it happened that a fresh agent was in Yulia’s blood.”

    Sounds like he suspects Yulia received a second dose while in hospital. She was making an unexpected recovery, partly because she’s healthy and partly because of the medical treatment, so somebody gave her another dose.

    Sergei wasn’t expected to survive because as Anton Utkin said, he “got heavier exposure to the chemical agent”, that combined with any existing health issues, he was simply expected to die.

  36. PAGE 2 OF 4
    “Georgia Pridham, 25, also saw the couple slumped on the bench. She said: “He was quite smartly dressed. He had his palms up to the sky as if he was shrugging and was staring at the building in front of him. He had a woman sat next to him on the bench who was slumped on his shoulder. He was staring dead straight. He was conscious, but it was like he was frozen and slightly rocking back and forward.”

    “Graham Mulcock said: “The paramedics seemed to be struggling to keep the two people conscious. The man was sitting staring into space in a catatonic state”.

    “Destiny Reynolds, 20, who works in Ganesha Handicrafts in the centre, said: “I saw quite a lot of commotion – there were two people sat on the bench and there was a security guard there. They put her on the ground in the recovery position, and she was shaking like she was having a seizure. It was a bit manic. There were a lot of people crowded round them. It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them.”

    Other reports: “Two police officers helped the pair before emergency services were called at 4.15pm.”

    Emergency services: “There were several emergency calls.”

    Channel 4 “Russian Spy Assassination”, 26th March 2018
    Male witness: “There was a man being sick on the floor, leant over, and a woman laying on the floor. I didn’t see the woman, she was surrounded by paramedics, but they both looked fairly ill.”

    EFFECTS OF NERVE AGENT POISONING
    Craig Murray’s article Knobs and Knockers quote from a scientist “Unlike traditional poisons, nerve agents don’t need to be added to food and drink to be effective. They are quite volatile, colourless liquids (except VX, said to resemble engine oil). The concentration in the vapour at room temperature is lethal. The symptoms of poisoning come on quickly, and include chest tightening, difficulty in breathing, and very likely asphyxiation. Associated symptoms include vomiting and massive incontinence. Eventually, you die either through asphyxiation or cardiac arrest”.

    EVENTS FROM 15.47 ONWARDS
    15.47 CCTV footage, if you analyse the shape of Sergei’s head and hairline with clearer pictures it matches. Two witnesses describe Yulia as having blonde hair. At this point, neither is showing any signs of nerve agent poisoning.

    16.03 (16 minutes later) Freya Church sees them slumped on the bench.

    Minutes later, both are becoming critically ill. From witness statements, Yulia is worse affected so the doctor attends to her and DS Bailey attends to Sergei. The reports say two police officers, but I think it was the security guard.

  37. PAGE 1 OF 4
    I think I’ve worked out how it was done and why DS Bailey was the only other person affected. It’s all down to METHOD OF DELIVERY. The attack took place between 15.47 and 16.03 near to where they were found. The door handle is a diversionary technique to draw attention away from this. There’s someone else calling themselves Anonymous, I’ll call myself Anonymous-1 see what happens.

    TIMINGS
    13.40 Arrive at car park
    Feed ducks and walk to pub
    Mill Pub (30 minutes)
    Walk to Zizzi’s
    (40 mins have elapsed from arriving at the car park to arriving at Zizzi’s)
    14.20-15.35 Zizzi’s (1 hour 15 minutes, there’s specific timings)
    (12 minutes after leaving Zizz’s they are picked up on CCTV)
    15.47 CCTV footage (older man with blonde haired younger woman with red bag)
    (16 minutes later they fall ill from nerve agent poisoning)
    16.03 Freya Church see them slumped on bench
    (5 other witnesses all see them on bench, with two ‘police’ officers and a doctor in attendance)
    16.15 Emergency service call(s)

    WITNESS STATEMENTS FROM NEWS REPORTS
    FREYA CHURCH: “Sixteen minutes later [that is, after being seen on CCTV], personal trainer Freya Church, 27, came across the victims slumped on a bench. She said they seemed ‘out of it’ and assumed they were on drugs. “It was a young, blonde and pretty girl and it was definitely the man that’s been pictured in the news – the guy that’s a spy. She was passed out and he was looking up to the sky and I tried to get eye contact to see if they were okay. They didn’t seem with it. To be honest I thought they were just drugged out as they were in a weird state. There are lots of homeless people here so I just thought they were homeless.”

    FEMALE DOCTOR: “A doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions. The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father. She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal’s face or body. The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent but added that she “feels fine.”

    “Witness Jamie Paine told the BBC yesterday: “Her eyes were just completely white, they were wide open, but just white and she was frothing at the mouth. And then the man went stiff, his arms stopped moving and still looking dead straight.”

  38. Regarding “the/a motive”, wouldn’t Putin’s alleged statement of vengeance towards the defector, Skripal, be enough to convince the UK government of there being at least “a motive” if not also “the motive”? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/06/traitors-will-kick-bucket-vladimir-putin-swore-revenge-poisoned/
    Also, I guess I need it spelled out for me. Why would Skripal’s assassination put an end to all future spy swaps?
    I don’t think Putin did it—he’s not so foolish as to have such poor timing politically—but I’m not so sure the UK government can’t legitimately show a possible Russian motive, for the purpose of helping the UK’s own political timing.
    Lastly, the commentators’ list of complicit conspirators is just too long to make this a real conspiracy.

    1. Putin didn’t promise revenge on spies, he basically said that such traitors would die miserable deaths because they had no homeland and had lost their soul
      There is a very full answer on this website if you scroll down
      https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40900/did-putin-threaten-to-have-traitors-assassinated

      Like most of Putin’s speeches this one has been deconstructed , mistranslated, then put back together to give the necessary slant

      There has never ever been a case of a spy who has been pardoned as part of a spy swap(as Skripal was)then later assassinated.And the last time that Moscow harmed the child of a target was when Trotsky’s son was killed in one of Stalin’s purges
      This all can be found in a Sunday Times article , but be aware there is a pay wall
      https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/salisbury-hit-on-sergei-skripal-would-rewrite-the-rules-of-espionage-6t89w9v9c

    2. Hi Bob,

      But the UK Government must know that Putin’s alleged promise to “choke” traitors was nothing of the sort. It was in fact one of the most blatant propaganda pieces I have ever seen.

      The video in which he allegedly said this appeared on BBC’s Newsnight and can be seen at this link:

      https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5735518/vladimir-putin-choke-traitors-video-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-poisoning/

      But the original can be found at his 2010 Q&A session when he was PM. The relevant section begins at just after 3 hours 12 minutes, and lasts for about 3 minutes.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8B9wGcDWVI

      As you will see, his answer is basically the diametric opposite to the one the BBC piece leads you to believe. They basically took what he said, hacked it about to extract the bits they didn’t want their audience to hear, and then put it back together (with some scary music) to make it sound like he said something he didn’t actually say.

      1. Rob, thanks for the satisfactory explanation of Newsnight’s deceitfulness. It appears that Putin didn’t give his potential future defector-spies a pass while at the same time shaming those caught at it as being like a Judas. I wonder, though, how those thinking about possibly selling out would read Putin’s deflecting the former practice of assassination decisions as resting on a head of state. He said it had evolved to being the decision of a special group in the security services. Of course he (probably rightly) dissociates his government from now operating that way. How are we to know apart from there being sufficient evidence to the contrary? But if Putin and his security services are in truth completely innocent I don’t see how his response could have been any better.

        I still don’t see why an assassination would put the damper on future spy swaps. Help my reasoning abilities.

        Regarding the claim of there being a growing multitude of unwilling conspirators, I wonder if this isn’t a case, at times, of commentators taking every thought captive to the obedience of “The Conspiracy Theory”.

        It might be beneficial for some agency to create a very public internet place where those caught up as witnesses to the case can come to make their clear statements or confessions without fear of reprisal. Possible attempts at reprisal could also be broadcast.

        1. I still don’t see why an assassination would put the damper on future spy swaps. Help my reasoning abilities.

          Tradition, it’s (p)art of the deal. Country A holds a country B spy and country B holds a country A spy. Both want its own spy back home for any one or more reasons. Why would country A release the spy it holds in exchange for the one that country B holds if country B reserved the option to at a later date take out Country A’s spy? Spy (or alleged spy) swaps only work with an implicit agreement that there will be no retaliation by either country against the individuals included in the swap.

          All the ins and outs involved in a spy swap are carefully considered. The swap must appear as of equal value to the two countries. The inclusion of Skripal in the US-Russia spy swap appeared odd to those that follow such matters as he had been a UK asset and by 2010 not of any particularly high-value to the UK. Nothing further has been said about this by the US, UK, or Russia; so, we’re free to concoct a devious plot where none existed.

          1. Marie, Reading what you wrote just triggered a thought… usually a spy swap is where, say, US spies caught and imprisoned in Russia, are exchanged for Russian spies caught and imprisoned in the US. Each country gets their own nationals back. The individuals were guilty of espionage in another country and get to go home.

            That is not what Sergei was. He was a Russian national, caught and imprisoned in Russia for treason. How did he ever get to become part of a spy swap?

            Why would the UK want to take him? He had no more value to them, he had already been paid for the information he had handed over… so why would the UK agree to take him and pay for his upkeep? What did the UK get out of the deal?

            On the other side of Sergei’s deal in 2010, Russia got Anna Chapman back – a Russian national caught and imprisoned in the US

            Have we been fed a pile of BS about what or who Sergei was?

            1. Wondered if anyone would catch that oddity in the Skripal case. Likely contributed to the head-scratching back in 2010. However, Skripal wasn’t the only Russian national released to the west in that swap. (And I’m not sure all those held by the US were Russian nationals – nor interested enough to research that.) We’re weren’t fed BS about Skripal because he was hardly ever mentioned at all. Remember, Skripal was a walk-in and for the money. Not important enough to recruit and while he had access to confidential personnel lists he was useful. (Not as useful as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were to the USSR but those two were also walk-ins and the money is important to both.)

              My two guesses on this – probably not worth anything –

              1) Russia held too few spies to make the deal work. So, he threw in some that were of no value to Russia and would be of some interest to the west to sweeten the offer. As Obama was already under criticism for giving up more than he got in his deals, he needed numbers (spies) to make this one look okay. The UK was told and not asked to accept Skripal. He, after all, was their guy even if he’d screwed up and exposed the fake rock and blew up the UK Moscow spy ring (I may be exaggerating on this point). IOW didn’t need, didn’t want, and had no use for Skripal. (Also meant they had devote assets to insure he hadn’t been turned into a triple-agent.)

              2) The UK asked the US to get Skripal out because they still needed to know exactly what Skripal had told the Russian investigators. That would mean that they weren’t competent enough to figure that out and/or Skripal was given a far larger role in the UK spy operation than Russia was able to determine.

              I don’t have a high opinion of MI6, the CIA, etc., but it’s still tough for me to buy scenario #2. So, I’ve been going with #1.

              1. So the UK was fulfilling its role as a vassal state…

                You comment just gave me another thought. Cameron became PM in May 2010 and the spy swap was in July 2010, so Cameron was then PM. It is a tradition (not a rule) that the next Tory PM hands out a knighthood to the previous Tory PM – and May hasn’t done that yet… I wonder why?

                The last time it happened (and that was the first time to the best of my knowledge) was Margaret Thatcher who refused to give one to Ted Heath – he had to wait until 1992 for John Major to give him one (if you will pardon the expression!)

                At that time, apart from the fact that Thatcher despised Heath politically, it was a very poorly kept secret that Thatcher’s refusal was driven by her knowledge that Heath was a paedophile.

                Nothing to do with the Skripals but it will be interesting to see how long Cameron has to wait.

                2. So the UK was fulfilling its role as a vassal state…

                  Only if there’s truth in my fiction.

                  May was Home Secretary as of May 2010; so, also probably on board with the spy swap — or it was too far along to being a done deal for she and Cameron to nix it when they came into office.

                  1. It was the British government who insisted on Skripal being included in the spy-swap made between 10 ‘illegals’ (placed as sleepers in the USA at the time, and led by Anna Chapman) and four national traitors.

                    These four were of more use to the West than the 10 illegals. Alexander Zaporozhsky and Igor Sutyagin had spied spying for the USA. Gennady Vasilenko was involved in illegal weapons possession, and the reasoning for him being included in the swap has never been disclosed.

                    “Skripal is considered the more important of the two as far as Britain’s security and intelligence agencies are concerned. He is likely to be debriefed for weeks, if not months. He will be given a home and pension if he decides to stay in Britain.
                    The future of Sutyagin [in Britain]… is less certain… He could yet return to Russia”.

                    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/11/british-security-services-debrief-russians-spy-swap

                    1. Pardon, but where does it say that the UK requested Skripal in the US-Russia spy swap?

                      Two Russians exchanged in a high-profile “spy swap” were today being debriefed by MI5 and MI6 officers at a secret location close to London.

                      SOP – wouldn’t want to let a triple-agent into the country.

                      Skripal is considered the more important of the two as far as Britain’s security and intelligence agencies are concerned. He is likely to be debriefed for weeks, if not months. He will be given a home and pension if he decides to stay in Britain.

                      Well, Skripal did help to blow up the UK’s fake rock spy communication set-up in Moscow. And the UK wouldn’t pass on an opportunity to have Skripal tell them exactly what he’d spilled to Russian authorities (likely everything). But that “home and pension” not only fills in a gap about what is publicly known about Skripal but also that the UK accepted that they were stuck with him as part of the spy swap.

                      Britain and the US say they have got more out of the spy swap than Russia because the four men released by Moscow were far more serious individuals than the 10 agents handed over by the US.

                      Do you think the UK and US would say they got the short end of the stick in the deal? Superficially (the ordinary person’s level of geo-political understanding), getting for Russian four nationals (three convicted of espionage, spying for the west and serving sentences of 15 to 18 years) for eleven low value Russians held by the west doesn’t look like the better part of the bargain. And in the US this could easily have become another anti-Obama rallying cry for the GOP and their right-wing crazies. That seemed not to have happened. Probably a too esoteric for that audience.

                      This is interesting:

                      One of those released to the US, Alexander Zaporozhsky, was a KGB colonel whose spying for the US is understood to have led to the unmasking of Robery Hanssen, an FBI officer, and Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer, two of Russia’s most important spies in the US.

                      If true, the CIA and FBI were in debt to Zaporozhsky and the official FBI and CIA stories of the unmasking of these two moles if fiction. I suspect that the above claim is the fiction. Designed to add weight to why Zaporozhsky was accepted in the swap and preserved the secrecy of whatever info he had actually passed to the US.

                      For now, I’ll stick with my guess that the UK wasn’t keen on being stuck with Skripal.

          2. Thanks for your reply, Marie. Just so you know, I don’t think the evidence supports the poisoning having been ordered by Putin. I would only contend that if he had ordered it Putin would have been anticipating a positive effect. It would have limited the number of UK spy candidates willing to risk spying against Russia. (Putin probably wouldn’t have foreseen the success of the sanctions campaign.) But, in my opinion, both parties –in the future—would continue their interest in spy swaps. In spite of the negative consequences of exposing them to murder, why not get ones spy back and better protect them?

            1. Russia (government, businesses and people) doesn’t consider the sanctions campaign very successful at all.

        2. It might be that an imprisoned spy will prefer to complete his prison term than to get swapped and thus to become a potential target for assassination.

          I wonder what Sergei is thinking now. His daughter’s life is ruined and may be in danger.

          1. I often wonder about how they and their family in Russia feel about this awful affair. We tend to forget the human side of the story, but we shouldn’t. Sergei, from all I hear about him, seemed a decent kind of man. He may have been foolish for being talked into betraying his country by Pablo Miller, but I don’t see him as a bad man at heart. Maybe he was desperate for money at the time or goinf throufgh a bad patch which would have made him more susceptible to manipulation. Who knows?

            But now his acts have somehow caused lives to fall apart and much I’m sure suffering. It’s my view that all governments are essentially evil (greedy, ruthless and self-serving), and don’t work in the interests of ordinary people – often working against them. The evidence of history bears this out.

            1. Craig Murray has been adamant that PM didn’t recruit Skripal and that Skripal was known as a walk-in. (It is generally accepted that at some point and for some undefined period of time that PM was Skripal’s handler.)

              A “nice” man doesn’t endanger the lives of his colleagues for money.

    3. Hi Bob,

      All those on the list aren’t conspirators as you think of them. More like further victims of the conspiracy. They dont know the whole story. They each only know a tiny bit of it. A bad bit, but have been frightened so badly that they are scared to tell that little bit, which will lead to the conspiracy unfolding. And make no mistake this is a conspiracy, a swamp conspiracy of the tallest order.

    4. Bob, it is not a list of “list of complicit conspirators” – it is a list of ‘people who know more than they have said’.

      They are not all involved in a conspiracy, they are witnesses to the conspiracy. They each have a story to tell that would open the lid on a part of what happened – not the whole story.

      Are they silent? I don’t know, the MSM has not tried to ask them what they know, maybe they will be happy to talk, if anyone asks.

      Mrs Cooper told Rob that Sergei was wearing leather jacket and jeans – she was happy to tell what she knew, all Rob had to do was ask. The Sun newspaper which broke the ‘duck’ story and went to interview Mrs Cooper did not even bother to ask that question – or if they did they did not reveal what she said.

      The conspiracy continues through indifference of the MSM – sooner of later that will change.

  39. Now here is someone who knows where Yulia is. The photographer in the Reuters video is of Yulia making her statement is Dylan Martinez.

    Reuters written reporters may know where she is as well. Reporting is by Guy Faulconbridge. Additional reporting by Alistair Smout. Editing by Simon Robinson and Nick Tattersall. There will be a video cameraman who knows as well and a video editor.

    Do you think you might write to them Rob and ask where she is?

    And if they wont tell you, what is their reason for not telling you?

    It will be interesting to see how they reply.

    1. Not necessarily where Yulia [b]is[/b], Liane, but where she [b]was[/b] at that time. The difference is crucial.

      1. As you know any information we can get is useful Miheila. We could learn a lot about who has Yulia, by were she was for the Reuters video and yes you are correct to suggest that she probably isn’t there anymore. Thank you. I think they will slip up soon, its getting to be a way too tangled web now with far to many people to keep silent.

        1. So tangled, Denise, that I feel it’s tangling the neurones in my brain!

          Does anyone know when exactly that video was recorded (rather than released), after all, the statement was mysteriously undated? Could there have been some kind of embargo on its release until a later date?

          Yulia was allegedly released on 10th April, 43 days before the video was broadcast. According to The Sun, a ‘source’ claimed that she’d been released from SDH into another hospital: ‘’She is in hospital on a military base for her own protection and to monitor her health.” Was the video recorded at that military base?
          Was it USAF Fairford?

          Could the CIA have pre-empted MI6’s hasty plans for the disappearance of the Skripals? Perhaps MI6 had nothing planned. Maybe it was a CIA operation from the beginning. I’ll need to think about these scenarios a lot more.

          1. Miheila, if you listen to the Daily Mail version of the video there are a lot of police sirens at the end including bull horns. That and the aircraft noise would point to London. It could be US Ambassadors residence in Regents Park.
            In my opinion, it was a rogue FBI op to stop “our guy” going back to Russia.
            I think UK authorities knew it was happening and organised medical cavalry to save Skripals.
            HMG are caught out, to admit it would be proof MI6 surrogates were interfering in US presidential election.
            So the Feds made it look like Russia and HMG have to follow the pretence.

  40. The people that know more than they are saying:

    Nick Bailey
    Charlie Rowley
    Helicopter pilot
    Helicopter paramedics
    Land ambulance paramedics
    Doctors at Salisbury Hospital
    Nurses at Salisbury Hospital
    Head of Porton Down
    Porton Down scientists
    Porton Down workers

    These may know more than they are saying:

    The Mill staff
    Zizzi’s staff
    Main stream media journalists (D noticed)
    Salisbury Journal journalists (D noticed)

    It only takes one to talk for the whole house of cards to come crashing down.

    Please feel free to add to this list.

    1. All the named witnesses
      The ebola nurse
      Whoever orgainsed the rapid response from the emergency vehicles
      All the police ‘searching’ for something
      Everyone who has seen the CCTV
      The guys in hazmat suits on 4 March

      Dozens and dozens of people

    2. People ‘highly likely’ to know the most, and are saying nothing:
      Chris Steele
      Pablo Miller (aka Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo)
      MI6 people
      GCHQ people
      Probably CIA, NSA, US State Dept, SBU, Mossad, etc. (take your pick!)
      MI5 people, including any watchers who may have been deployed
      FCO people

      People who know more than they are saying:
      certain people in the Russian Foreign Ministry
      GRU, FSB, FAPSI people

      People who may know more, and may be willing to speak:
      Various Salisbury witnesses, named and unnamed
      Ross Cassidy
      The Filmers of Distillery Farm??

    3. In my scenario some of them could be genuine. If the emergency services were told extra medical/police/fire resources were available for that Sunday due to the ” CBW exercise” that was going on they wouldn’t publicly question it.
      Maybe when the Skripals were on the bench they thought it was not “real world” and that is why they dashed in.
      But I think HMG knew Yulia had come to extricate Sergei and knew rogue elements in UK and US “intelligence community” were trying to assassinate him.

  41. Rob Willing I will make a heart felt plea.

    Any contributors on here offering an alternative theory to the Hoax should be aware (although they may be blissfully unaware) that the Hoax has been proven.

    It is a fact.

    So before putting out new theories please recognise that fact and possibly try the refute / debunk / disemble the fact before you put forward your take.

    Don’t get me wrong (although a few will) I think that brainstorming and testing theories is fine, more than fine it is essential to test ideas and testament to the progress that this blog has contributed, advanced and assisted public understanding in the unravelling of the case.

    If you have an alternative theory please let it coincide with at least a few facts.

    1. @Peter
      The scientific method (a la Popper): observe, deduce, theorize, predict (i.e. show how the theory matches/predicts the things observed). And, if necessary, adduce (i.e. defend the hypothesis).

      What is never done is to insist dogmatically that one’s pet theory is the only explanation. This is because it is the duty of every scientifist to, having produced a theory, seek to demolish it. You aren’t doing that, Peter, instead you are challenging others to demolish it.

      I wonder at your motives.

  42. I think fact that Sergei Skripal an ex spy may have confused issues? He may or may not still have been actively doing intelligence but all evidence points to accidental poisoning by drug addicts sleeping rough.
    1. Reported that 40/50 rough sleepers including drug addicts, living in area at time of Skripal poisoning.
    2. Contaminated public lavatories and a “drug den” in park.
    3. Council blocked off rough sleepers area and rehomed drug addicts after Skripal poisoning.
    4. Charlie Rowley rehoused at about that time?
    5. OPCW not permitted to analyse all ingredients associated with poisoning which they say makes it very difficult identifying substance
    6. Two men (Kim Ferguson and Jamie Knight) forced their way through police barricade to get to bench where Skripals had been sitting
    6. Dawn Sturgess’s poisoning looks like classic One Pot Shake and Bake methamphetamine accident. Fact that fire brigade called and she was in bath suggests explosion and burns.
    7. One Pot Shake and bake produces large amounts of toxins which are dumped. Public loos in park reported contaminated and report of a drug den there.
    8. Skripals, Sturgess and Rowley did not respond to naloxone so not opioid poisoning, this fits with it being poison from waste left from one pot shake and bake meth.
    9. Salisbury Hospital Doctor said no-one was suffering from nerve agent poisoning.

    1. “but all evidence points to accidental poisoning by drug addicts sleeping rough”

      No it doesn’t! eg when the police want to trace the movements of a couple that have been caught up in a accidental poisoning they release a photo of what they looked like on the day.

      There is a mountain more evidence that says this was what it is ……… A Hoax! A hoax that led to the death of Dawn Sturgess. That was not accidental !

      1. Yes, Peter, a great ever-growing mountain! Such as Spiez identifying a novel cocktail of BZ with pure A234, the dramatic police and military response, etc., etc…..

          1. Max_B
            Incorrect. For example, quoting from OffGuardian 17th August:

            “Lavrov commented, in strong language for him, that the fact Spiez Lab found these two doses of A-234 in the samples “appears to be utterly suspicious.”

            Also, Marc-Michael Blum, Head of the OPCW Laboratory and leader of the technical assistance team that was deployed to the United Kingdom said:

            “The Labs were able to confirm the identity of the chemical (Novichok, or A -234) by applying existing, well-established procedures. There was no other chemical that was identified by the Labs”.

            That last sentence was a lie. He was deliberately covering up the confirmed presence of BZ.

            1. The OPCW said they had never seen it before so how do they know it is what the UK said it was?

              In their advice on Nerve Agents the OPCW make no reference to Novichok for the simple reason they don’t know what its is. Its something New, its a Newcomer. Russia worked on the 4th Generation Nerve Agents (Binary and Unitary). So did the US, UK and many more, some may have shared their knowledge. The Russians didn’t.

              Nobody knows, except the Russians, what came out of the Foliant Project. Porton Down can guess and that guess probably found itself on Skripal’s front door handle a week or two after the bench incident.

              The OPCW don’t know what the Russian 4th generations products looked like, they don’t even know what they were called. So to say “its what the UK says it is” was not just misleading it was a lie, because they don’t know.

              The OPCW could publish the formula of the chemical they found; they can’t say it is a Russian Design, they can’t say it was ever Researched, Developed, Manufactured or Stockpiled in Russia, they can’t say that particular sample originated in Russia. Well they can say that and did but that was a lie.

              “The OPCW director general, Ahmet Üzümcü, also pushed back against recent Russian claims of bias, saying its scientists had been able “to collect both biomedical and environmental samples under full chain of custody and also splits of earlier samples taken by the British authorities for comparative purposes. The OPCW analysis clearly confirms the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical used in Salisbury that severely injured three people.”

              In his presentation, the UK OPCW envoy pointed out that the OPCW noted that the chemical was of high purity, indicating that the chemical was not volatile and would degrade slowly. “All this is cause for grave concern as we now face a clear case of a new family of toxic chemicals intended to kill,” he said.”

              https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/18/opcw-rejects-russian-claims-of-second-salisbury-nerve-agent

              1. The OPCW has known about Novichok (not under that Name) since 2016 when Iranian scientists in collaboration with the OPCW produced it (see Tim Heyward on this). Some years before, as Wikileaks revealed, the US prohibited the OPCW from researching novichok.

            2. @Miheila

              Err… nope… I’ll just repeat myself, It’s never been revealed that the Spiez labs found “A234”, whatever that means…

              1. I will qualify my reply to Peter: “Yes, Peter, a great ever-growing mountain! Such as Spiez identifying a novel cocktail of BZ with pure A234 [according to Spiez via Lavrov, and according to Blum, but minus the BZ], the dramatic police and military response, etc., etc…..

                I hope you are happy now.

                1. I listened to Lavrov at the conference, he mentioned only one chemical… BZ. He omitted to mention the other.

                  It’s never been revealed that the Spiez labs found “A234” (whatever that means…)

                  1. I wonder why you keep saying this. It is not true. Here is Lavrov quoting from the Spiez report:

                    “‘“Following our analysis, the samples indicate traces of the toxic chemical BZ and its precursor which are second category chemical weapons. BZ is a nerve toxic agent, which temporarily disables a person. The psycho toxic effect is achieved within 30 to 60 minutes after its use and lasts for up to four days. This composition was in operational service in the armies of the US, the UK and other NATO countries. The Soviet Union and Russia neither designed nor stored such chemical agents. Also, the samples indicate the presence of type A-234 nerve agent in its virgin state and also products of its degradation.’ End of quote.”

                    http://www.mid.ru/en/press_service/video/-/asset_publisher/i6t41cq3VWP6/content/id/3169545

                    1. “I wonder why you keep saying this. It is not true”.

                      I wonder too. I can only think that he’s either trying to push a particular agenda (without success).

                    2. Sorry, you’re absolutely right Cherrycoke, I’ve got that wrong. Lavrov did claim that Spitz labs also found the presence of a type A-234, in addition to BZ, which he suggested he found odd, due to A-234’s high volatility and the long length of time between the Salisbury incident and the OPCW inspectors visiting.

            3. The quote from the article in the Off-Guardian —

              “The Labs were able to confirm the identity of the chemical (Novichok, or A -234) by applying existing, well-established procedures.”

              — is false. Marc-Michael Blum said:

              “The Labs were able to confirm the identity of the chemical by a
              pplying existing, well-established procedures. There was no other chemical that was identified by the Labs. The precursor of BZ that is referred to in the public statemen
              ts, commonly known as 3Q, was contained in the control sample prepared by the OPCW Lab in accordance with the existing quality control procedures. Otherwise it has nothing to do with the samples collected by the OPCW Team in Salisbury. This chemical was reported back to the OPCW by the two designated labs and the findings are duly reflected in the report. ”

              https://www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/EC/M-59/en/ecm59dg01_e_.pdf

              He says:

              a) BZ was in the control sample.
              b) He does not mention A-234.

              Lavrov had spoken of A-234 (see my comment below). Nobody has denied that the Spiez Report he was quoting from is authentic. A-234 then must have been in a different sample (Lavrov/the quote from the report is not specific here). This was probably the authentic sample (because they would not put A-234 in a control sample, especially as the narrative was that only Russia could produce it, now would they?).

              1. Hmm, very interesting, Cherrycoke. So now OffGuardian are misquoting people. Maybe the words in brackets were intended to be wht they assumed he meant – but all the same very confusing. The OPCW have still not said what the identified chemical was. Why are they hiding this? Could it be a kind of ‘new newcomer, ‘Neonovichok’ – created by Porton Down. Something that would be classed as an official secret maybe, too sensitive for public disclosure.

                I don’t know what to make of him claiming that BZ was in the ‘control sample’. The bench poisoning symptoms could certainly have been due to BZ. I agree with all you say in that last paragraph too.

    2. I agree the Salisbury incident was caused by Sergei’s involvement in handling illicit narcotics. But the 12th March statement by the PM in parliament is very carefully worded, and confines the nature of the substance involved.

      1. A scientific paper published in 2012 by five Porton Down scientists contains detailed information that suggests a lethal Fentanyl analogue, such as Carfentanil, would meet the UK governments description of “A Novichok” and “Military Grade Nerve Agent of a type developed by Russia”.[1]

      2. Carfentanil was made an internationally “controlled substance” at the 61st Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs which opened on the 12th March 2018 in Vienna. [2]

      3. Just after 5pm on the 12th March 2018 the PM made the first official reference to “part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichok” and “Military Grade Nerve Agent of a type developed by Russia” in a statement which she delivered to Parliament. [3]

      4. You’re probably already aware of the Opioid crisis which is sweeping the world, the USA and Canada being particularly affected by an enormous number of deaths each year [4]. On 26th June, there was a recent discussion in parliament on Fentanyl’s. [5]

      5. Carfentanil has already been seen in powder form within the UK [6]. An alert originally issued last year by Tulli (Finnish customs), goes into more details about how lethal Carfentanil is, and also identifies that Carfentanil is entering Finland in liquid form, supplied in small 20ml bottles. [7]

      6. Fentanyl’s are not routinely tested for during UK autopsies, as specialised toxicology testing is required. [8]

      7. An April 2018 news article on Fentanyl related deaths published by UK drug charity Change Grow Live, states that they have planned two additional round-table events, one for Salisbury and one for Exeter to prevent future fentanyl-related deaths. [9]

      8. The British government generally provides a stipend to former spies, but in the past, defectors have protested that it is too small. In 2005, an ex-Russian spy named Victor Makarov [10] went on hunger strike for eight days, whilst camping outside Downing Street in protest over his miserable living conditions. Mikhail Butkov [11], another K.G.B. defector, was imprisoned for three years for creating a fake business school and defrauding would-be students out of 1.5 million pounds.

      [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Timperley/publication/267402862_Analysis_of_Clothing_and_Urine_from_Moscow_Theatre_Siege_Casualties_Reveals_Carfentanil_and_Remifentanil_Use/links/5772ec3008ae07e45db24735.pdf

      [2] https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/a2d5215c-3aef-4460-8c2b-186667d3777f

      [3] https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-03-12/debates/722E1DF5-68E2-41A0-8F3C-23B6480B93BF/SalisburyIncident

      [4] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/index.html

      [5] https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-06-26/debates/18062667000001/FentanylSentencing?highlight=fentanyl#contribution-EF250C71-1977-4D31-ABAE-1F7AD1E0B684

      [6] http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/1367-organised-crime-group-mixed-potentially-lethal-drug-fentanyl-and-posted-it-around-the-world

      [7] https://www.epressi.com/tiedotteet/hallitus-ja-valtio/finnish-customs-warns-about-an-extremely-dangerous-medicinal-substance-carfentanil-merely-handling-the-substance-can-lead-to-death.html

      [8] http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/795-recent-deaths-possibly-linked-to-fentanyl/file

      [9] https://www.changegrowlive.org/latest/blog/fentanyl-and-drug-related-deaths-the-local-perspective

      [10] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-39665013

      [11] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VealDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT182&lpg=PT182&dq=Mikhail+Butkov+prison+sentence+fraud&source=bl&ots=_k_IyXI70X&sig=UdK1H7mbnYApt0KbMsT7edGbyeM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjavf-Eu8zcAhXCT8AKHQaUBN0Q6AEwAHoECAIQAQ

      1. Sorry I had missed that Fact

        “I agree the Salisbury incident was caused by Sergei’s involvement in handling illicit narcotics”

        Please could you point me to the evidence that Sergei was mixed up with illegal drugs.

        1. It is not a fact, Peter.

          As I’m sure you know, carfentanyl is not a nerve agent, but an analogue of fentanyl (a synthetic opioid), and the so-called novichoks (A-230 series) are organophosphorous nerve agents – probably never produced on any significant scale.

          This particularly amused me:
          “A scientific paper published in 2012 by five Porton Down scientists contains detailed information that suggests a lethal Fentanyl analogue, such as Carfentanil, would meet the UK governments description of “A Novichok” and “Military Grade Nerve Agent of a type developed by Russia””

          This is stretching the ‘Novichok’ definition to extremes, and is highly unscientific – not to mention illogical. Chemically they are worlds apart. The article relates to the possible use of carfentanyl in the Moscow Thetre Siege – as an *incapacitant*, not as a lethal nerve agent. It was more likely to have been trimethyl phentanylum (3-methylfentanyl). It was certainly not a nerve agent of any kind. This explains why 680 people there survived. The 170 who died (including 40-50 terrorists) would have succombed to OPIOID-induced apnea.

          1. @Miheila

            Err no…

            1. a nerve agent is *any* substance that alters the functioning of the nervous system, especially one capable of being used as a weapon. Fentanyl, and it’s analogues including Carfentanil are synthetic opioids which *are* nerve agents. They depress the CNS, and are well known for producing wooden chest syndrome. They are Chemical Weapon incapacitants, and also banned by the US Dept. of Defense for use as battlefield weapons.

            2. A Novichok is just the generic label used for any chemical investigated by the Russian military for use as a weapon after the 1950’s, but sometime before 1994.

            That Russian military research on fentanyls occurred before 1994 is evident from a passage in a book authored by General Antonov entitled “Chemical Weapons at the Turn of the Century”. A former director of the Military Chemical Institute in Shikhany. It states that: “…the action of analgesics is a knock-out blow, personnel subject to an attack of forces only a few minutes after the beginning of a chemical attack will lose their capacity to stand, not to mention move about. In severe cases people will enter an un-conscious state and *carfentanil* is one of the most active substances of the entire group of the studied derivatives of fentanyl. It manifests its activity for different pathways of entry into the organism, including inhalation of vapours or aerosol….”

            So yes, Fentanyl’s and particularly Carfentanil, are both nerve agent’s and can be classified as a Novichok.

            1. An axe in the head is a Nerve Agent by that definition.

              So let us stick to the OPCW Definition for now but you play what ever game you want

                1. The OPCW has issued that note as a direct result of the findings of the Salisbury affair – concerning unnamed ‘toxic chemicals’. Those findings have never been made clear to the public. However, nowhere does it suggest that the fentanyls, nor BZ for that matter are, or should be, termed nerve agents. These incapacitants are not even mentioned.

                  “The incident in the United Kingdom involved a highly toxic
                  nerve agent with a structure that has appeared in open literature but has never been declared under the Chemical Weapons Convention”. This clearly suggests that the Novichok group is being referred to here – but why not say so?

                  Unlike fentanyls, the Novichoks are nerve agents – of the organophosphate type, unlike the opiod fentanyls.

                  1. Typo: “…opioid fentanyls”.

                    By the way, Max_B, I’ve read Antonov’s book, and have already written a lengthy clarification of CW terminology that refers to this work, and if you continue to insist on redefining scientific terms according to personal whim, I’ll post it as a main post (rather than a reply) for the benefit of any Newcomers (pun intended).

                    1. I really don’t care Miheila… Fentanyl’s and Carfentanil *are* nerve agents, I understand you want to rely on a much narrower definition of nerve agent that only includes Organophosphates, but that definition is just not accurate. The substance responsible for the Salisbury and Amesbury incidents isn’t an Organophsophate, that’s why they are scrabbling around for a redefinition, and why no one has officially said that the substance is an organophsphate, and why no one has officially denied the substance is an Opioid.

                      These powerful synthetic opioids like Carfentanil, do depress the CNS. In it’s 10th July presentation for diplomats presenting the case for redefinition of CW’s, the OPCW singles out BZ, and Carfentanil for special mention, and as an example of the confusion over CW definitions.

                      It gives the example of BZ, whose lethal toxicity concentration/mg is much higher, and then contrasts that with Carfentanil which is not a CW, but shows it’s an opioid with lethal toxicity concentration/mg that is much higher, approaching that of Organophosphates.

                    2. sorry…

                      “…but shows it’s an opioid with lethal toxicity concentration/mg that is much *lower*, approaching that of Organophosphates.

          1. It’s late here, so rather than laboriously address your comments now, I’ll leave others to make up their own minds about the seemingly disingenuous game of semantics you are playing, and your stated belief that the “Salisbury incident was caused by Sergei’s involvement in handling illicit narcotics”.

            Err, by the way, I’m sure we’d all love to hear an answer to Peter’s query, which was:

            “Please could you point me to the evidence that Sergei was mixed up with illegal drugs”.

  43. This is the biggest mystery of my lifetime and I hate not know wtf the thing was about and what actually happened. I can’t believe the thing hasn’t yet been exposed as the scam it is. I first knew something was wrong when the media were reporting that the Skripals were in Salisbury hospital. Something about the reporting convinced me they were not actually there. It just felt fake

    1. ” I can’t believe the thing hasn’t yet been exposed as the scam it is.”

      It has, just not by the police, government and the MSM.

      But the thinking masses know, Russia knows, Germany knows, Trump knows but can’t help playing the Pantomime Dame.

      Its not a secret. It was a hoax. It led to the death of Dawn Sturgess so those involved are looking at very long jail sentences. Including Mrs May.

      And if that is not bad enough, we have a craven Parliament supporting a sick twisted government and instead of getting their own House in order they think the public should take out our despair in politics and the Rule of Law out on Jeremy Corbyn.

      The swamp will be drained but not without more bloodshed, I am sure about that. Things have gone too far this time, too much is known. In their current form the government, parliament and police will never be trusted again.

      That is a very dangerous situation indeed.

      1. Its a bit like the Emperors New Clothes, the fawning courtiers are looking on and saying how magnificent they are.

        The public spectators looking on are saying WTF!

      2. “Its not a secret. It was a hoax”

        Undoubtedly, but it was a hoax covering up a secret. A poorly-planned hoax responding hurriedly to the feared imminent exposure of the secret.

        HMG cannot afford for this to happen at any cost. The ever-shifting official narrative is the result of the constant need to apply ‘first aid’ to the hoax in order to prevent cracks appearing that may expose tell-tale glimpses of the secret. In time, the patching-up operation could well fail.

        1. @Miheila
          Poor William of Occam must be turning in his grave – (pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.”).

          Put elsewise: do not multiply entities unnecesarily. Keep it simple is always the rule.

          and nobody has yet given any clue as to why the dog didn’t bark.

          1. We should be grateful for the wilful disruptions / distractions but I would have hoped for better skilled Trolls to be deployed.

            But there is a flaw in my desire.

            Descartes I think “You can’t polish a turd” (loosely translated)

            1. Throw insults as much as you like, Peter. I can assure you that I’m not a troll, I’ve been following this whole saga quite assiduously since its beginning. Further than that, it piqued my interest because of my research into (over the past two years) the events in Syria and other places around the world where the fetid hand of FUKUS has felt it necessary to lay itself.

              This whole sage is related to events in Syria and most likely has deep connections with the intent to demonise Russia.

              Still, if it calms your soul, please feel free to throw some more personal insults – it seems to be your thing, as Marie can attest.

                1. @Peter
                  There are two possibilities for Dawn: either she and Rowley were genuine drug overdoses or the perpetrators acted to try and reinforce the novichok scenario and it backfired because Dawn (unintentionally) died. The whole story with the perfume bottle seems to point to the latter.

                  1. If it was a genuine drugs overdose / accident then a street / prescription drug would be involved, we are reliably informed the substance was Novichok.

                    Therefore even if the Novichok claim was a lie this leaves you with only one option

                    1. As a direct result of the Amesbury incident, Detective Sergent Eirin Martin of Salisbury CID took the “…unusual step…” of issuing an official warning via Wiltshire police to “…drug users…” in south Wiltshire “to be extra cautious”, two days after Dawn and Charlie were admitted to hospital. “We are asking anyone who may have information about this batch of drugs to contact the Police”, “…where the drugs may have been bought from, or who they may have been sold to.”

                      Fentanyl’s, particularly Carfentanil *are* Novichok’s.

          2. To Cascadian:
            Either, you are naïve, or pretending to be so. Thsoe who work in the intelligence world are hardly the kind of people who believe in ‘keeping things simple’!

            If the world’s intelligence services turned to Occam’s razor as their last resort they’d soon be out of business. A key feature of the these organisations is to spread disinformation thickly, to create vast halls of mirrors, to build labyrinths… Distraction is their business. They’ll stop at nothing to divert attentions away from the uninitiated catching even the slightest glimpse of anything they consider should be kept secret.

            1. To Cascadian:

              You refer to “…events in Syria and other places around the world where the foetid hand of FUKUS has felt it necessary to lay itself”.
              Yes!

              “This whole sage is related to events in Syria and most likely has deep connections with the intent to demonise Russia”.

              Maybe. I feel the Skripal affair very quickly became used as a convenient political opportunity – by opportunist anti-Russian politicians. Originally, as Yulia had hoped, it was only expected to be a local low-key affair, but when the first blunder was made (whatever that was) it became a widely-publicised national and international affair. That was when it began to be exploited for political capital.

              As for Dawn and Charlie, I agree: either they were genuine drug overdoses or cases of deliberate poisoning. In each case the state would have capitalised on this and tried to reinforce the novichok scenario. Dawn’s death reinforced it all the more, and a moderately plausible story had to be created to account for it – the perfume bottle. Alternatively, if the poisoning was intentional, a actual perfume bottle could well have played a key role.

            2. Perhaps and analogy: X-Ray crystalography.

              I am not in the least trying to imply that the intelligence (odd that they should choose that word to describe their activities) services seek to obfuscate and confuse, this is one reason why I harbour a slight suspicion regarding contributors to this blog. However, regardless of the theater, deceptions, look her, look there, etc. being acted out by the perpetrators and those who seek to benefit from the whole affair, there must be a simple underlying structure to it all – hence the analogy. We do not aid analysis by speculating about the how and the why.

              I don’t believe it was a hoax, we seem to have forgotten the TV series episode that occurred just two weeks prior to the incident with the Skripals – it was in that episode that a certain individual was poisoned with (guess what?) NOVICHOK.

              This whole thing was planned in advance, and was probably a repeat of the Litvinenko poisoning with a different agent, but an agent with a finger in it, a finger that pointed right at Russia.

              And what about that other Russian that died a couple of weeks later and everything about that went very quiet very quickly.

              1. correction “seek to obfuscate and confuse” should be “do not seek to obfuscate and confuse”

              2. Do you know what a hoax is? You say you don’t believe it was but then the only evidence that you offer says it was.

                1. @Peter
                  “Do you know what a hoax is?”. I think I do, but I think you are misusing the term. There most certainly has been an attempt at a malicious deception (all the theater, the suppression of any discussion, the pointing of fingers at probably innocent parties, etc.), but I think you are alluding to the complete absence of either of the Skripals in what has transpired.

                  As I have already stated, I have spent a lot of effort (which has cost me in terms of effort that could/should have been spent elsewhere, thus slowing down my progress there) researching the background to events in Syria. The logistics associated with events in that sphere have been sufficient to convince me that some very long games are being played and that a great deal of effort, and expense, is applied to the removal of obstacles in the path of their plans: Iraq was one such, Libya was another, Syria and Yemen and others, Iran is also in the way, as are Russia and China.

                  I believe that most on this blog would agree that our media is already compromised and in the service of TPTB. This can be extended to the playwrights and the film makers, and the example introducing the idea of a novichok is a prime example – there are others, the continual representation of the lurking enemy: the Afghan Taliban (created by the CIA).

                  But the one thing that strikes me most directly is the arrogance and ineptitude of the players involved.

                  And further to that, novichok is a fiction, it’s about a real as a pig with wings.

              3. “…one reason why I harbour a slight suspicion regarding contributors to this blog”.
                Very wise. So do I. I’ve been sorting wheat from the chaff most of my life! Not always easy.

                Yes, that film series. That has always niggled me. Let’s suppose it was their source of poisoning inspiration. Let’s also suppose that two competing groups became involved at different stages. Let’s say here was a pre-planned, well-organised operation prepared by group A, but when group B somehow discovered learnt of it, a hurried attempt was made by group B to scupper group A’s plan – which might have failed. Just speculation, but it would account for many anomalies. Occam might disapprove though! 😉

                These two groups could be two different intelligence agences, or one of them possibly being a rogue faction within an intelligence agency.

                And I agree, we shouldn’t forget Glushkov.

                1. @Miheila
                  Anther thing that occurs to me is the massive military exercise that was in progress prior to the Skripal incident. The exercise that included a chemical warfare element, hence the military nurse who magically appeared at the event.

                  The whole thing has the mark of a warning, to Putin. A warning that, if he doesn’t all into line with the West’s plans and desires, that, as Douma so ably demonstrated, CW would be used whenever it was necessary to project the actions of the west onto any state which stood in their way.

                  The only problem is that it didn’t go quite as planned, Skripal was supposed to have died, his daughter too. It’s what happens when you don’t prepare for all eventualities. It’s called ineptitude, and they’ve got it in spades!

                  1. You could well be right, Cascadian.
                    They need to use their spades of ineptitude to bury one another on a remote spot on the Porton Down ranges.

  44. Key quote from Sara Carter’s revelations about text messages from Christopher Steele to Bruce Ohr in October 2017:

    “Steele notes that he is concerned about the stories in the media about the bureau delivering information to Congress ‘about my work and relationship with them. Very concerned about this. *People’s lives may be endangered*.'”

    https://saraacarter.com/breaking-bruce-ohr-texts-emails-reveal-steeles-deep-ties-to-obama-doj-fbi/

    Now, this might seem a bit of an aside, but does anyone reading this blog have any idea when Yulia last came to England prior to 3rd March this year? I’m trying to get an idea of whether she is likely to have had any idea prior to this visit of what her father was involved in, or whether she is likely to have learnt about this on this particular visit.

    1. Thanks Rob and we are all grateful for your capacity to harness all the contributers into a sane dialogue.

      Motive indeed:

      There are the pleadings by Steele to Ohr for reassurance that the “firewall” is solid! Not sure what that intends but surely there are a few firewalls in this saga going all the way back on the US side to the favorite candidate, the candidates party, the party legal team that employed Fusion GPS, Fusion GPS itself, Orbis, Steele, Sergei, and perhaps Yulia. What might have been her potential role other than innocent visitor. We now have a clearer view of her employment trajectory. I would bet the firewalls on the UK side are fully aluminium clad too, and I anticipate this site and a few other emerging lines of inquiry will penetrate those.

      The furious mother in law angle is a good one and potentially worth a serious look.

      Sometimes murders deliver conveniences to unforeseen parties.

      The overreach of British interference in the USA election and May’s complicity in that exercise needed a very good redeeming cover and here is a dandy.

      The mafiosi angle cannot be ruled out and nor can the Ukrainian possibility given their intense penetration of the EU playing ground. Perhaps Sergei was investigating things there too and annoyed the new mafiosi now free to roam.

      But I am sure that closer to home there are others that employed Orbis to do interesting work. How’s Bill Browder these days?

          1. Correction – >Who signed pg 392? Lisa Page

            Page was the fourth firewall (not Comey), but she is already gone too.

            If Rosenstein knew of Steele’s relationship with the Ohrs prior to signing FISA, he already knew that he was signing a BS FISA application – which would be perjury. But if Rosenstein was a ‘firewall’, it becomes an attempted coup and sedition… awkward.

    2. In answer to your question, no. What I have observed from published reports is an accent on how close Yulia and her father are and how frequently she visits him. Evidence of either hasn’t been supplied. My sense is that this hasn’t been accurate.

      What I also note is that all the published and on-line photos of Yulia with Sergei and Alexandr seem to be old. A fuller faced and make-up free Yulia, mostly with light blond hair, and somewhat dowdy in dress. She’s appears more glamorous, varies her hair color, and exudes a fun-loving posture in the photos without her fam

      1. The photos of Yulia with Sergei were taken by Alexander, so they are naturally old as Alexander died a few years ago. Some of the photos of the new, more glamorous Yulia were apparently taken by Sergei, as those photos depict her against an English background. I remember at least one photograph of Yulia with Sergei’s black cat (now dead).

        1. How would you know who took the pictures? And Alexandr only died July 18, 2017, just over one year ago.

          Other than the photo of Yulia with Sergei’s cat, I don’t recall any with her looking more stylish that can be dated and the location identified. It’s merely an observation on my part and not proof of anything other than stylish Yulia in photos with Sergei haven’t been made public,

        2. How would you know who took the pictures? And Alexandr only died July 18, 2017, just over one year ago.

          Other than the photo of Yulia with Sergei’s cat, I don’t recall any with her looking more stylish that can be dated and the location identified. It’s merely an observation on my part and not proof of anything other than stylish Yulia in photos with Sergei haven’t been made public,

    3. Hi Rob
      Sasha died in Russia and I believe he was cremated. Were his ashes left in Russia or is interred beside his mother?. Is it a possibility that Yulia could have brought his ashes to England?

    1. I admit it. I was listening to the rather excellent audio version by Martin Jarvis with my children a week or so ago 😉

  46. Excellent comment on the definite article preceding ‘motive’ but I am not quote sure what TM meant by ‘the intent’. Is it distinguishable from ‘the motive’?

  47. Rob,
    Before we even talk about ‘motive’, was this actually an assassination attempt?

    What sort of assassin uses such a third-rate product? I has only killed 1 out of 5; the time to respond is completely unpredictable. It’s a bit naff isn’t it?

    Furthermore, if we want to speak about motive: why was Yulia a target too? What has she done? Surely it would have been easier just to get Sergei and not involve a foreign national – especiallly a foreign national with a cousin wanting some publicity for her election bid. Putting Yulia in the frame made this a much bigger story in Russia. An old spy getting a ricin pellet from an umbrella, on a rainy day in Salisbury, would have been more effective and would have attracted far less publicity.

    I do not believe that it ever was an assassination attempt… if a major state player had wanted Sergei dead, he would be dead.

    I said some months ago, that one way to determine ‘why’ it all happened was to look at the result and see if that gave us a clue about the original intention. At that time I said that the one clear result was that Sergei had vanished and that THAT was probably what was supposed to happen from the beginning. Everything else was incidental to that result.

    The passage of time has not changed my opinion about that but intervening events have forced me to modify it.

    The UK is now a global laughing stock. Nobody believes the story. German politicians are perplexed by the lack of evidence. HMG and the police continue to look completely incompetent. Was that also an ‘intended’ result? I think it probably was.

    Whoever did this, set out to do two things:
    1) to make Sergei disappear (and to take Yulia with him); and
    2) to embarrass the UK.

    Thus far, whoever it was, has been extremely successful.

    1. Paul, I agree but disagree.
      I agree in that this cannot have been an assassination attempt. For many reasons.

      My disagreements is that as yet, the expulsions, upcoming sanctions, global sympathy etc believers (outwardly) are holding a steady line in that so far, the international community are agreeing with the Maybot.

      1. Duncan,
        The ‘international sympathy’ appeared to me to be a ‘show of strength’ – but even then it was not unanimous, not every NATO member joined in and the EU itself did not expell ANY Russian diplomats.

        In any event that sympathy has worn very thin as the UK continues to make its claims without any evidence having been provided. the UK said the evidence would be forthcoming and it has failed to keep its word.

    2. Paul, I can only speak for myself, but motive, or specifically that Putin/Russia had a motive, to knock off a convicted former double-agent that Russia had included in a spy-swap was my introduction to the news about an incident in Salisbury. Specifically, The Guardian report – Tues 6 Mar 08:40 EST –

      https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/06/boris-johnson-uk-will-respond-robustly-if-russia-poisoned-spy
      Boris Johnson: UK will respond robustly if Russia poisoned spy

      After a quick search on Sergei Skripal (who I’d never heard of before because I don’t pay that much attention to spy game news), it’s also is what pinged my bs meter.

      As you correctly point out, the inclusion of Yulia, even if only as collateral damage, made that alleged Russia motive less tenable. What was floated in soon after BJ’s allegation in the media was that Skripal could have played a role in the Steele dossier; thus, giving Putin a current motive. That was quickly dropped because it opened too many other cans of worms for UK/US officials.

      The motivation of Johnson and May to exploit this incident seems clear, but we’re still left without a culprit that sought to harm the Skripals. For me, as a plot to disappear the Skripals, it’s too complex, requires too many collaborators, and had too many uncontrollable variables.

        1. Hi you!

          Most of what we have been told is nonsense – there is no way through the quagmire. All I am suggesting is “Look at what actually happened” and maybe there is a clue about what the original goal was – not who did it or how, simply what caused all the nonsense. If the original plan was not to make Sergei vanish, I have absolutely no idea what it was all about.

    3. Right on Paul, right on: embarrass the UK!
      Thatcher and the sinking of the Belgrano! embarrassing indeed,
      Bliar and the pandering to war and so much more! embarrassing indeed,
      Boris and the banality of ignorance, embarrassing indeed,
      The bliarites and their unrelenting assault on a decent party leader! disgusting embarrassment indeed,
      The UK main stream media and their servile complicity in deceit! embarrassing indeed!

      Leave them all to it as they succeed without any assistance from outside.

      1. Thay have got away with their lies for too long but this time we are up against incompetents who have become lazy- which gives us an advantage. They have made too many mistakes and the world is not buying it.

  49. Gavin Williamson and Gary Aitkenhead

    I believe these two conspired to give Mrs May some anti-Russia ammunition, which initially was their own daft idea, but became a hole, which just got deeper with their digging.

    Door handle, Zizzi table, leave some around for Charlie, DSB spilling it, Porton Down not finding it, but Aitkenhead reporting that it was found, OPCW shown reference Novichok that PD had for years, lets drop a bit here and there in Salisbury to keep the Terror level high, that get the 2019 budgets approved, Theresa, didn’t we do well -pesky Russians etc. etc

    Gavin is the new Defence Secretary.
    As he is new, you might want to read this excellent summary of his job skills from Tom Peck of the Independent.
    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/gavin-williamson-nato-theresa-may-brexit-defence-secretary-select-committee-a8364241.html

    Gavin is the neophyte lap dog suddenly in the sunshine when the Brexiteers left the ranks.
    Gary Aitkenhead is the dynamic man in charge of Porton Down.

    It is my belief that Porton Down did NOT ever find Novichok in Skripal blood, Zizzi tables, QEG toilets or anywhere else in Salisbury or Amesbury.
    Nerve agent, more than likely BZ was deployed, and it was deployed by UK people or US personnel who are based in Porton Down.
    How
    After the Skripals visited the Mill Pub, or after they left, they were sprayed with BZ by heroic Sgt Bailey.
    He was probably a familiar face as Sergei’s handler/minder/local contact.
    Bailey was in the Mill Pub, and the Mill was definitely the drink after the meal spot. That is, the last visit before the short walk and collapse at the bench.
    If he was successful in spiking the drinks with BZ, were observed from a distance, and then got close after the collapse.
    If he did not get the chance to spike the drinks, then he used a spray after the Skripals left the Mill.
    Now my challenge to the Blogmire readers is to find a fault with this theory.
    Recent posts have implied that the Skripals were whisked away to safety, or two subs collapsed, etc.
    I do not agree with this.

    As I have said before. If disappearance is the goal, then Bailey or someone else could have taken Skripal to Heathrow, met Yulia, and be on the other side of the world quite quickly.
    In the UK, no one would ask or care, if the Russian (UK) spy left Salisbury quickly.
    Would Russia care if Yulia was missing for months, never heard of…?
    Viktoria might have mentioned it, eventually.
    In the grand scheme, why have an over elaborate air ambulance, second chopper, substitute couple etc?

    What is the goal?

    Make the Skripals disappear
    Kill them
    Teach Col. Skripal a lesson, and if he does not behave, then “they” can target Yulia as well, to really scare him.
    Persuade Yulia into becoming a double/triple agent.
    Something else?

    I look forward to your challenges.

    1. “Clinical effects from ingestion or inhalation of BZ appear after an asymptomatic or latent period that may be as little as 30 minutes or as long as 24 hours; the usual range is 30 minutes to 4 hours, with a mean of 2 hours. However, effects may not appear up to 36 hours after skin exposure to BZ. ”
      http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/FileDownloadpublic.aspx?docid=13d94373-93f3-47a9-9822-c572b3b6aa43

      I have no idea how BZ could have been employed to ensure they collapsed simultaneously on the bench.

      1. Paul, it may be a misinterpretation that they collapsed simultaneously. Initial reports and eyewitnesses both described Yulia as being more physically distressed and Sergei was described as being conscious at least when paramedics first arrived and possibly when he was loaded in the ambulance.

        wrt BZ, the physical symptoms simply don’t match that for BZ (regardless of how fond I’ve been of that interpretation). Possible that BZ was mixed in whatever poisoned them, but probably not likely.

        1. If they did not collapse simultaneously why was there no cry for help from either of them? Surely, if one of them had still been compos mentis, they would at least have called “Help! Get a doctor!” – there is no such report.

          I can see no way of achieving what seems to have happened, other than an instantly active incapacitating agent of some sort, delivered directly at the bench. Different ages, different weights, different sex, etc etc – how do you get them to succomb within moments of each other? The fact that ‘Yulia’ was reported to have been in a worse state than ‘Sergei’, does indicate that she may have got more of it but whatever it was, the attack took place at the bench.

          1. There was no cry of help from either of them, but only Sergei reportedly had maintained some level of consciousness until after paramedics arrived.

            …does indicate that she may have got more of it but whatever it was…

            And she reportedly recovered more quickly. Unlike Sturgess when more equaled death.

              1. Marie, I know. Reports said ‘Sergei’ was still conscious as they loaded him into the ambulance.

                I am not looking at what happened to them after they became incapacitated, I am more interested in what they did just before that happened. For all practical purposes, they succumbed at the same time and neither of them was able to call for help. How does that happen, except by an attack at the bench?

                1. Perhaps one of them was unable — or didn’t recognize the need — to call for help and the other one chose not to call for help.

                  1. Okay, so, if we go with (as many have pointed out) that Zizzis was, despitethe current official version of events, was before the pub, then the Skripals went from the pub to the bench. At some point (can’t remember if it was Rob in his blog or a commenter discussion), the pub waitress’ recollection, via the media, was that Sergei went to the wash room and, when he came back, he appeared to have “drunk” too much. So, what if Yulia thought the same thing, and suggested getting out of the pub? Then, as they walk, she begins feeling the effects of whatever it was, and heads for the bench? It’s only a few minutes of difference in the agent’s taking effect, but if Yulia got more and Sergei got less, it would seem that he started being affected by a smaller dose first – which, given his age and the (implicit) assumption I’ve noticed that he was not as healthy as his daughter by commenters, should, thanks to the waitress, be a bit of clarity . . .

                  2. iirc that report about Sergei at the Pub wasn’t from employee and at best seemed to have a second-hand quality to it. Difficult for me to put much credence in one report when others were there and no similar reports have surfaced anywhere since then.

                    But going with your scenario, you need a murderer in the Pub that is equipped with numerous CCTV cameras. A murdered that first zapped Sergei and caused him to stumble/lose his balance. Some minutes later with an intent to killed, zapped Yulia with a stronger dose that didn’t take effect until after they left the Pub. Both then differentially impacted but able to walk as far as the park bench and neither making any call for help. And finally, Yulia sickening faster and recovering sooner from her larger dose.

                    I’m thinking Pub first and Zizzi’s second, primarily because Zizzi’s was closed more than twelve hours before the Pub was closed. However, I’m indifferent to the order and there’s a plausible reason why the Met CT would have closed Zizzi’s first as they’d already determined that the Pub was more likely ground zero.

                    1. I was thinking that since I agree with those who noted that Sergei’s agitation at Zizzi’s was due to his having an appointment and since others pointed out that the first order was said to be Zizzi’s-Pub and then changed to Pub-Zizzi’s and given that “spycraft” includes having “drops” in public restrooms and since the waitress did not notice signs of “inebriation” before the washroom visit, then Sergei sees his cue to visit the washroom, goes, picks up something there, is dosed there or something was in both of their drinks, so that he comes down appearing as if drunk. And again, his age and health status may have made his system respond faster if it was something in the drinks, something which would also be affected by the difference between Yulia’s and his drinking behavior (type of drink, speed of drink, whether either of them finished or left a drink unfinished).

    2. My guess :
      Neither BZ nor Carfentanyl (symptoms don´t match).
      Novichok also not, at least not the old series, which was developed in the Soviet Union.

      I suspect it was a nerve agent, but either Soman or Tabun, or a mixture that has not been mentioned in any literature so far. An “exotic mix”.
      Remember : “The agent used is not thought to be the widely-known Sarin, VX or Novichok but a substance described by Whitehall sources as ‘exotic’.”

      If the evil forces around Steele are behind it, then the nerve agent did not necessarily came from Porton Down.
      Maybe that’s why France was consulted ?!

      In any case, I have no doubt that the Skripals came into contact with the nerve agent just before they reached the bench. Maximum 30 minutes before.

      Diarrhea is one of the early symptoms. Maybe that’s why Sergei was in the bathroom at the Mill Pub. Maybe that’s why the rash departure, because the two wanted to get to the car quickly. But they did not manage that anymore.

      You see, Duncan, until now I´m not convinced that it were NOT the Skripals on the bench.
      It´s a pity that you found nobody in Salisbury who could confirm or falsify this important matter.

      1. Thanks Liane.

        It was difficult in Salisbury to get anyone to speak about anything.

        Are you now thinking that it was definately the Skripals on the bench at 4-15?

        1. No, Duncan, I´m not sure about it. Both is possible.
          That´s why it´s so important to find out.

          1. Unfortunately, there really isn’t really any way of verifying this, Liane. I’ve messaged most of the named people who were there at the bench (or close by), but haven’t got anywhere with any of them.

            I think the thing that makes me more confident that it was the Skripals on the bench than not (although by no means 100%), is the fact that you would have to assume that all the people who treated them at the hospital are either in on a plot, or are lying to save their skin. I can’t see that. Besides, in the evidence given to the High Court by the consultant (Dr Stephen Jukes, I assume), the names Mr Skripal and Ms Skripal are used a number of times (as opposed to “Patient A and Patient B).

            In addition, I really don’t trust the witness testimony that casts doubt on the people on the bench not being the Skripals. For instance, Georgia Pridham said the girl had a hood up. Olly Field said she was a “blonde bird”. He may have just seen a little bit of her hair, and it may have been a bit lighter at the front. Besides, as far as I can tell, he and Georgia Pridham and Freya Church didn’t really get up and close. By their own accounts they “walked on by” and so I’m not sure how much credibility we can place in the snapshot memories they got.

            For my money, it was almost certainly the Skripals on the bench — and I’m currently developing some new ideas around what I think most likely happened, but they’re not solid enough to share just yet.

            1. Rob,

              We don’t have much in the way of evidence at all – much of what we do have is contained in those witness accounts and if we throw those away, we have practically nothing!

              Mrs Cooper said Sergei was in a leather jacket. Cain Price said the police had told him that Mr Skripal was wearing a green coat.

              If you listen to Freya Church she sounds like she saw quite a lot and she was 100% sure the people on the bench were the people from the CCTV.

              Georgia Pridham said she specifically noticed they were well dressed and had a second look.

              Olly Field gave TWO interviews in which he said the female was blonde.

              If you want to ignore all of them, then fine but the testimony of those witnesses taken as a whole is consistent and nowhere does it describe a 60 year old man in a leather jacket and jeans. Apart from Gerogia Pridham’s ‘parka’ and one comment that “she looked too young to be with him”, what in the witness accounts can you point to that does NOT describe the couple in the CCTV?

              There is a lot of evidence you will have to ignore that points to the bench couple being the CCTV couple.

              Are you going to go with the police saying Sergei was in a green coat, or with Mrs Cooper and her leather jacket? Why did not a single witness say leather jacket and jeans?

              1. I keep forgetting to re-enter my name! Have you changed the cookie settings so that it does not remember our previous entry?

                  1. OK but the way the system auto inuts our details is via the cookie files. I cleared mine and tried again but that did nothing. Can you set a flag for ‘Remember me’ in the settings?

            2. One more thought Rob. The witnesses all described what they saw BEFORE the pictures of the Skripals were widely available. Do you think it is possible that one of the reasons nobody has asked them since, is that they now know that the couple they saw on the bench was the CCTV couple and not the Skripals?

              It is a really simple question for each of them isn’t it? “Was the couple you saw on the bench, the CCTV couple or the Skripals?” Yet not a single mews outlet has done that.

              And why no CCTV picture of the couple on the bench before they became incapacitated? It would have ended all speculation, backed up the official story and done no harm whatsoever.

              1. Paul,

                I definitely hear what you are saying and understand why you are saying it. If it was a case of going on the witness statements alone, I would completely agree.

                But the two considerations are basically these:

                1. If the witness statements are as they first seen, and it was not the Skripals on the bench, then a significant number of hospital workers would have to be in on the whole thing, or lying to cover themselves.

                2. On the other hand, if the people treated at SDH were the Skripals, then it could be that the witness statements are simply not as reliable as they seem.

                I have fewer problems believing the second than the first. For instance, the woman in the CCTV, although unclear, is most definitely not too young to be with the bloke. Whereas, as you mentioned, Georgia Pridham says she did look to young.

                But the thing that really does it for me is this. If the couple on the bench were not the Skripals, I’m very sure we’d have heard about it by now. Not through the media, but through local gossip. I simply cannot imagine any circumstances where the 5-10 people who saw the 2 people collapsed on the bench, would not blab it to someone or other. Would all of them keep quiet about it? No way.

                Same with the hospital. There would be bound to be a few people there, not in on the plot, if such a plot existed, who would find out about it. Would none of them blab? Almost inconceivable.

                If the couple on the bench were not the Skripals, but TPTB wanted everyone to believe they were, they’d have been taken to Porton Down, not to SDH where it would be almost impossible to hide their identity.

                Anyway, it’s great to keep each other on our toes and thinking this stuff through.

                1. I entirely agree with you that we should challenge each other but it will take a lot more than you have said to persuade me it was the Skripals on the bench.

                  I think that what emerged in the initial 24 hours is more likely to be true that what has come since – that is 100% lies and cover up.

                  A Salisbury resident left a comment in the SJ that she had been to SDH (I think it was 5 March) and nobody would talk about it.

                  You seem to place great store by the fact there was ONE witness statement in the High Court from ONE doctor that mentioned the Skripals. Frankly, what else could they say at that point? I am 100% sure the choice was sign or resign (and here is an indemnity for you)! Why was SDH not represented at the hearing? Why did SDH say they were ‘uncomfortable’ going beyond their clinical role?

                  Why do none of the same doctors mention the “Skripals” in the Newsnight programme – watch it, the Skripals are mentioned once at the beginning of the programme… and never again by anyone from SDH. Not once!

                  Martin Brunt said, live on Skynews, that none of his contacts had seen the Skripals in SDH! When has that ever happened before? How much would a single picture of the Skripals in SDH have been worth? Apart from one witness statement, there is nothing to say they were ever there – and we already know that was not the only thing about the court hearing that was not entirely kosher! It was the Government Legal Department!! What would you expect?

                  In the Alfie Evans case, in Liverpool, information was leaked – a secret video was published by an Italian newspaper. This time there were no leaks…. because they were NOT there! There was nothing to leak.

                  A spoof Russian TV crew wandered around SDH on 11 April – why was security so lax?

                  Sorry Rob, you have a mountain of evidence, both actual and circumstantial, to demolish or ignore.

                  1. Rob:
                    You say “If the witness statements are as they first seen, and it was not the Skripals on the bench, then a significant number of hospital workers would have to be in on the whole thing, or lying to cover themselves”.

                    But supposing these two ‘bench people’ had been identified as the Skripals from articles planted on them – such as bank cards, etc. – but significantly no mobile phones! Before the old Skripal photos had become generally known, hospital staff would naturally assume the two patients were the Skripals. Only later would doubts arise, and by then ‘specialist’ doctors and nurses from elsewhere (PD/military hospitals) would have taken over their care entirely. In the evidence given to the High Court naming Mr & Ms Skripal, we can’t assume this was provided by SDH’s Dr Jukes. It may have come from the outside ‘specialists’.

                    It wouldn’t surprise me at all if staff and other locals are ‘blabbing’ but as long as their suspicions are kept suppressed by the media, then the hoax remains safely contained. Naturally, gossip and speculation would have been rampant at the time and that it continues among SDH staff, their friends and relatives today. What we need is someone who can tap into this.

                    Paul:
                    You say – “You seem to place great store by the fact there was ONE witness statement in the High Court from ONE doctor that mentioned the Skripals. Frankly, what else could they say at that point? I am 100% sure the choice was sign or resign”. As I said earlier, this one (conveniently un-named) doctor, may not have even worked for SDH, but could have been an MoD doctor from elsewhere. It would go towards explaining why SDH were unprepared to be represented at the hearing, by which time senior SDH staff may have suspected or been aware of the patients’ false identities.

                    1. The Judgment says that one of the witness statements was from:
                      “ZZ: Treating Consultant”.

                      ZZ is not named but Rob believes it was Dr Jukes – in his comment above Rob says: “(Dr Stephen Jukes, I assume)”

                      Bu Miheila, you are correct that the statement could have come from any medic that the government wheeled in for 2 minutes to have a look at the Skripals. It does not have to be from one of the medics at SDH.

                      When trust has gone, there is not much left…

            3. “Besides, as far as I can tell, he and Georgia Pridham and Freya Church didn’t really get up and close.”

              I thought Freya walked up to them?

    3. Duncan asked „What is the goal ?“

      I think the goal was to get hold of important documents.
      That´s why both were attacked. I don´t see Yulia as collateral damage.
      They can use the two to put pressure on each other.
      They could not kill the two, because maybe Sergei had secured the documents with a notary for the case of his death.
      As I mentioned before, they searched Sergei´s home not only for suicide notes or drugs.
      They left not a single stone unturned. Look at the chaos they produced in Sergei´s backyard.
      They even let the water out of his heating system.
      The searched the neighbour houses. And so on.
      Why was Bailey forced to disappear ? I see only one reason : Silence all who could blurt out the truth.
      The big picture is, that it was not Russia which interfered in the Trump election, but the UK government. And it’s more likely the hell will freeze until they admit that.
      Therefore it was unthinkable to let Sergei escape to Russia.

      1. I agree with all of that Liane. And I would only add that I think DS Bailey is a good guy in all this (I know Duncan will disagree), and he may have got what he needed from them (from the red bag or from Skripals house) as he had been shadowing them not to attack them, but to protect them. And this is why his house was bought by HMG. For the same reason as Sergei’s. They are looking for documents and/or SD card that he may have taken for safe keeping.

        1. Rob, you know I have to bite at this one.
          Did Bailey:

          Not get sick at all?
          Got contaminated at the door handle?
          Got contaminated at the park bench?
          Something else?

          Number three would suit HMG, but they claimed Number 2. This is how the lies started when Lord Blair told Radio 4 this version.

          The door handle fantasy implicates Bailey’s part in the cover up.

          1. Totally agree!

            And not just that. Where was Bailey’s warrant to search the Skripal house? He was there by 5pm! The bench couple were not yet even in the ambulance and Bailey is looking for a ‘suicide note’ – how was that going to help?

            Who here thinks it is OK for the police to grab your keys and let themselves into your house?

            Bailey’s entire role has a very high ‘dubious’ factor… in fact worse than that.

            1. Its contrary to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act or unlawful / illegal . The law makes a provision for a police officer to enter a premises only if there if it were thought that life or limb could be saved.

              No drug paraphernalia found at the scene, there was nothing to support that a clue could be found in the home, the intoxication most likely occurred close to where they were found.

              1. But when druggies are found anywhere in the world in a zombie state has it ever happened before or ever likely to in the future that the attending detective discovers where the victim lives and goes to find out what Might be responsible?

              2. I’m with you Peter and I am sure Bailey kew that too. Even finding a suicide note would not have saved life or limb.

                So why did he do it? If he actually did suspect a crime, any evidence he had found would be inadmissable because it was an illegal search.

                As the police themselves have found, it is not easy to make up a lie that ‘explains’ his behaviour and actions.

                1. That Police lie was further compounded by the Assistant Chief Constable praising Bailey.
                  The ACC had apparently reviewed the body camera footage and the police team were exemplary.
                  No mention of Bailey’s 5pm visit and the fact that his first visit was solo.
                  Is switching on the body cameras standard practice in raiding a suicide victim or drug OD survivor.
                  No, its when door handle Novichok is on the loose.

          2. Ha! I admit I only put it there to provoke a reaction from you Duncan 😉

            I absolutely agree that Bailey was involved in the “cover up”. The question is, which “cover up?” I am now tending fairly strongly in the direction of there being two cover ups. What I mean is as follows:

            1. That there was some attempt by some faction of Intelligence to poison the Skripals.

            2. This was done to target not just Sergei, but Yulia too, as it was feared Sergei was about to send her back to Russia with some kind of evidence about the origins of the Trump Dossier.

            3. Another faction found out about this plot and scrambled to try to prevent it, or at least mitigate it, as they realised that if this happened, Sergei’s role in the Trump Dossier could be made public, which would be disastrous for HMG.

            4. Hence the remarkable speed with which the emergency services responded; hence the reason two PD doctors happened to be at SDH; hence the reason they knew what treatment to use. Faction B knew in advance what Faction A were going to do.

            5. If there’s anything in this scenario, D.S. Bailey may of course have been part of either faction. But I tend to think that he is more likely to have been part of the second group. Hence the reason he was at the bench (shadowing them); hence the reason he went quickly to the house (to try to search for anything like a document or SD card that the faction he was representing would not have wanted to fall into other hands).

            6. He was therefore part of the cover up of the Faction A’s activities, but this also meant that a cover up of his activities was necessary, since if it was known what he was trying to cover up / mitigate, the whole thing would blow up and Sergei’s activities would become known anyway.

            What makes me think that there may be something in this, is that the “carefully planned plot” to disappear or kill Sergei just does not explain the sheer number of oddities and incompetencies in the case. Whereas if we imagine a plot, but then another plot to try to stop that or mitigate it, a number of things start to fall into place.

            Oh, I realise it’s probably all bonkers. But tell me an explanation for what happened on 4th March and afterwards that isn’t 🙂

            1. Rob,
              Two plots and two coverups – agreed!

              So who were party A and party B? The problem I see is that UK inc. is dirty.

              May – dirty
              M_5 – dirty
              M_6 – dirty
              The Met – dirty

              They are all on the same side – led by May who pulls the levers.

              How do you get 2 factions on the UK side? If you take out HMG/M_5/M_6/Met – who is left?

              If party A was a faction within UK ‘intelligence’ intending to poison the Skripals (I don’t actually believe that anyone wanted to do that but let’s leave that for now) – who was the opposing faction? Where are we going to find a party B within the ranks of UK inc.?

              There were two factions and I think party A was UK inc.. But party B won, which is why UK inc. is still looking in bins for whatever it was they lost. Party B has been very successful in covering its tracks – we don’t even know who they are, never mind what happened to the Skripals. Party A on the other hand is revealed and is involved in the most ludicrous and amateurish cover up I have ever seen. The lies are transparent and they can only keep a lid on it because of the lickspittle MSM.

              As for Bailey, I say he was M_5 – how could he be part of party B? You would need to imagine that M_5 stood against HMG for that to make any sense and I just don’t see that.

              Party A was the first to mobilise. It was in control (or so it thought). It had the press ready to roll and did not think it could lose. Party B got in the way and won. If party A had won, we would not have seen any of the nonsense that has evident for the last 5 months. If Party A had got the Skripals (as they expected) we would not have seen rubbish bins being searched months later. We would not have had to listen about novihoax and its remarkable properties. We would have had none of that… which is why the Skripals were not on the bench and why the Skripals were not at SDH. UK inc. lost!

              1. Thanks Paul. I think we’re agreed on the most substantial thing:

                That the only plausible explanation for this whole affair lies not in there being one party who created a false flag or who had some kind of plot which simply went wrong, but in there being two parties.

                Of course the details are different:

                In your view, Party A was attempting to do something with the Skripals, and Party B defied them, snitched the Skripals from under their noses, and left Party A desperately trying to cover their tracks with a couple of people in SDH who were not the Skripals (a couple of dupes perhaps?) and with a serious amount of egg on their faces. In this view, Party A is British Intelligence, whereas Party B is perhaps some sort of Trump supporting element of US Intelligence/military. The Skripals are therefore currently under their protection. Have I got that right?

                In my view (which I am by no means going to be dogmatic about), Party A wanted to get rid of the Skripals, but Party B caught wind of it and tried either to stop it (and obviously failed), or mitigate it (hence the super quick reaction times, the too quick identification of nerve agent, and the PD doctors at the hospital who knew how to treat it). Just to say that in this view, neither Party A or B are necessarily “good”. It’s just that they have a different perspective on outcomes. Party A would be FBI/CIA Intel with nerve agent from US part of Porton Down, and Party B would be British Intelligence believe what Party A is about to do is potentially disastrous, and so try to stop it.

                Although the details are quite different, I think that the most significant thing is that we have both (as have one or two other commenters) concluded that the only thing that begins to explain events is that there was some kind of “battle” between two Intelligence factions, and subsequent events have really all been a rather pathetic attempt to cover this up.

                We should sleep on it. And keep thinking it through. And keep subjecting both our own and each others ideas to criticism. We may even end up agreeing on the details and reach a satisfactory conclusion 😉

                Thanks for all your contributions.

      2. Liane, There is one story I have seen but there is absolutely nothing to back it up. You may have seen similar already.

        The story goes that Trump found out about the dossier while it was being prepared and he encouraged it – in fact the more outrageous the better, because when the time came, it would be seen to have been so ridiculous that only really desperate people would ever have believed any of it. To achieve this end, Putin’s help was solicited – and Putin duly arranged for ‘material’ to be put in the right hands… it ended up with M_6.

        M_6 passed it onto Steele, who passed it on to Miller, who passed it on to Sergei who was also working from his own sources to see what he could find.

        It is hard to conceive of a more embarrassing situation for HMG. State assets provided Sergei with information, for onward delivery to an overseas political party, the sole aim being to interfere in an election. Incidentally, a UK private company was also being paid for information it had been handed on a plate by HMG.

        If there is even a grain of truth in that, it is easy to se why HMG would be very keen to recover any ‘official documents’ that still exist.

      3. Yes, Liane, so true: “…it was not Russia which interfered in the Trump election, but the UK government.”

        So important! And the CIA know this.

        The operation was hurried because HMG couldn’t afford to wait for the Skripals’ next move. The risk was too great. Because it was hastily planned, mistakes were made from the outset, and these mistakes quickly needed covering up, which in turn spawned further mistakes.

      4. Yes, Liane, “it was not Russia which interfered in the Trump election, but the UK government”.

        So important! And the CIA know this, and so do the Russians.

        HMG had to act very quickly in order to prevent the Skripals’ planned next move. There was no time to create a well-planned operation. Due to this, from the very outset, mistakes were made, and these mistakes had to be hastily covered up, a process that spawned further mistakes.

        1. Now it’s duplicating replies! My first two attempts with this post didn’t work at all. Then with the tird one it told me I had duplicated my post, but offered no way of removing one. How frustrating!

          Rob: Sgt Nick Bailey may well have been a good guy, but if he was shadowing the Skripals he was doing it unofficially, and Sergei would have been aware of this. (See my earlier post about how this would normally have worked). Also, I find it decidedly odd that he was (allegedly) wearing a body camera at the time.

  50. I’m really sorry people, but I’m going to have to disable the images on contents plugin. Firstly, it seems not to be working properly, and secondly, I think it is messing the comments section up generally (people’s names not being registered etc). I’m sorry about this. I’ll maybe revisit this soon to see if there’s a plugin that works better.

    Rob

    1. This seems to be plastic flowers as on Alexander´s grave.
      It’s VERY good that you got me to take another look at the graves. Because I noticed something.

      We all believe the Skripals were at the graveyard because they allegedly put down a fresh bunch of flowers on Liudmila’s grave. Fresh flowers = visit at March 4.
      BUT after a closer look on Liudmila’s grave there do not seem to be any fresh flowers, just four different plastic bouquets.
      The same plastic bouquets as on Alexander´s grave. The bouquet is in a golden metal plate with holes in it. Even the price tags are still on the bunches – typical for men.
      The same golden metal plate is on Liudmila’s grave, with the different plastic bouquets in it.
      In the long shot you can see that in front of it is a square plastic vase that is empty.
      Would not you place a fresh bunch of flowers in the vase of water instead of in the metal plate without water ? Men might do that, but a woman never !

      Conclusion : If there is no fresh bunch of flowers then there is no proof that the Skripals were in the cemetery. Between 9:15 am and 1:30 pm they might have been elsewhere. Even in London.
      It could also have been a third person driving the BMW on London Rd while the Skripals met someone unobserved at another place.
      That would also explain the switched off handys.

      Two links with the graves :
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-russia-graves/gravestones-mark-family-losses-of-russian-agent-struck-down-by-mystery-substance-idUSKCN1GJ2F2
      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5471659/Detectives-investigate-deaths-Russian-spys-wife-son.html

      1. Liane,

        I think you have to work through your Men Issues

        The last we saw of Yulia was in a Moscow airport, the next a Reuters news feature. Sergei? Buying some milk and scratch cards a few days before, not seen or heard of since.

        If flowers were suspected then they would have been removed for testing. But they would have took the plastic ones too unless they knew they were not newly placed or tidied up.

        How long was the cemetery closed?

        Why might he be in London and not Budapest?

        I think Sergei was probably there, at the cemetery. I think they had to go through every urn and flower pot in the place, every grave, every nook and cranny. looking for whatever they were looking for.

        Not all men are bad. Some of us are quite sensitive and try to do our best. What would be best leave the price tag on or not take any at all? A woman would have just took a fresh bunch from a neighbouring grave and planted them on her dearly departed. A woman probably wouldn’t have found the grave anyway.

        1. Haha, Peter, I had to smile about this „I think you have to work through your Men Issues“.
          But then comes this „Not all men are bad. Some of us are quite sensitive and try to do our best.“
          Excuse me, but I was really lying under the table laughing. And that stayed that way until the end of your posting. For such counter-attacks I love men !

          As for the flowers: At the time of the photos, nothing had been removed from the graves. The HazMats came a little later.

      2. Thanks Liane, that is a high probability option. I love your forensic attention to detail. Its the man in me:))

      3. Conclusion : If there is no fresh bunch of flowers then there is no proof that the Skripals were in the cemetery.

        Good observation. I have been accepting that there were fresh flowers meaning that someone had placed them there on 4 Mar. It was curious given that the storekeeper said that Sergei purchased new plastic flowers every few weeks (or months). Also curious that officials never moved beyond stating that they believe the Skripals had visited the cemetery around 9:15 as they made an appeal to the public for any information on the Skripals from 9:00 to 1:00.

      5. Could “fresh” flowers been an assumption in the reporting of the visit? As Marie points out plastic flowers were Sergei’s usual purchase ( it’s a Soviet habit for graves)?

    2. P.S.: Look at the slide shows for the long shots !

      I’ve always wondered why a Saint Bernard stands on Alexander’s tombstone. What could that mean?

    3. Could that be a Mobil phone beside the white box? Relatives leave momentous personal to the loved one regarding the figurine of the dog .Christmas wreath can be seen.A family of animal lovers caring for grave as it is well kept since 2011-12.

    1. No, Thick, that are not the Skripals.
      The three persons are not related to each other.
      The woman coming from behind has a small dog on a leash. The dog could be a pug.
      The man’s clothes do not match what Sergei wore that day. We know from Mrs. Cooper that he was wearing a light brown leather jacket and blue jeans.

      1. Thankyou Liane
        I have never been sure about this one.
        Love the blog and all the comments you make and translate.Sorry Rob is having trouble with the pics .
        PS I will call myself thick cos my name is Theresa and I don’t think anyone here would reply to s theresa

  54. Steele to Ohr – “I am presuming you’ve heard nothing back from your SC (special counsel) colleagues on the issues you kindly put to them from me. We have heard nothing from them either. To say this is disappointing would be an understatement! Certain people have been willing to risk everything to engage with them in an effort to help them reach the truth. Also, we remain in the dark as to what work has been briefed to Congress about us, our assets and previous work.”
    Hmm I wonder who the “certain people” and “our assets” were…
    Looking more like a covert FBI op all the time to save Steele and Mueller’s bacon.

  55. Hi all,

    Seems like lots of people are having trouble adding images. I’ve tried one or two plugins. Anyone familiar with wordpress who might be able to help me out?

    Rob

      1. Thanks. I’ve decided to disable the plugin altogether for the time being as it’s messing the whole comments section up. Will revisit it next week.

        Rob

        1. Rob, after each post or refreshing the site, name and email disappear, so you have to type it again.

  56. Rob,

    Just as a sidebar. I too am having issues with the file attachment feature.
    I wanted to add a picture as a test of the feature in my reply to Liane’s last posting about the BBC and the timeline.

    This was my comment, however when I file was attached it would not post and gave me the same error as Peter and the others have mentioned.

    “Thanks Liane,

    I sent a letter (email) of complaint to the BBC. (No reply expected.)
    Quite laughable as they end their timeline with “all times are approximate.”
    I am going to add a picture to this Reply comment, just to see if it works.”

Comments are closed.