Skripal Affair

 Skripal Affair (false flag attack?,  mid-level deep event)

Date	4 March 2018
Location	Salisbury,  Wiltshire,  England
Interest of	Duncan Allan, Neil Basu, Bellingcat, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, John Helmer, Kit Klarenberg, Rob Slane, John Ward, Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media
Subpage	•Skripal Affair/Boshirov and Petrov in the UK
Description	A purported chemical weapons attack. The Integrity Initiative carried out extensive research into how to control the narrative of the event.

The Skripal Affair began in Salisbury, UK on 4 March 2018 when Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia were taken ill. The British government very soon accused the Russian government of having sent two (or more) operatives over to assassinate Sergei Skripal with the exotic poison novichok.

The corporate media followed the British government line closely, in what soon became a massive campaign involving the Integrity Initiative and diplomatic actions.

The numerous and large holes in the British government narrative was soon pointed out by numerous independent ('alternative') media outlets, which also pointed out the close contacts between British media and British intelligence.

Three months later, two drug addicts, Dawn Sturgess (who died) and Charlie Rowley were diagnosed as having come in contact with novichok, causing a second wave of interest in the affair.

Background

In the 1990s, Sergei Skripal, then still a Russian citizen, was working for Russian military intelligence service GRU. Skripal was recruited in 1995 by Pablo Miller, a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, better known by the acronym “MI6”) agent in Madrid. MI6 assigned Skripal his spy nickname: “Forthwith.” After a successful espionage service under diplomatic cover in Madrid, Tallinn, and Warsaw, Miller retired and settled in the small town of Salisbury in the south of England, about 80 miles from London.

Meanwhile, in December 2004, Sergei Skripal was arrested by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and later tried, convicted of high treason, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In July 2010, an exchange of spies took place in Vienna (Russia gave up four convicts for espionage, including Skripal, the United States ten accused spies.) Skripal accepted the offer of his former curator and settled in next door to Miller in the same town: 47 Christie Miller Road, Salisbury, Wilts SP2 7EN, which was purchased by MI6 in August 2011 for £260,000.

Toxic Danger

Full article: Toxic Danger

The Salisbury incident was co-incident with 'Exercise Toxic Danger', the largest exercise of its type in the UK)

Chronology of Salisbury Events

• On 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal and his visting daughter Yulia Skripal spent the day together in Salisbury city center. At 13.40 they park, and go to The Mill pub. At approximately 14.20, they eat at the Zizzi fish restaurant on Castle Street. At 15:35, they leave the restaurant.

• At 16:15 emergency services are called after the pair are found semi-unconscious on a bench near Queen Elizabeth Gardens.

• Colonel Alison McCourt, Chief Nursing Officer of the British Army and her daughter Abigail were walking past this first-ever use of a “military-grade” nerve agent. As McCourt is one of the few people in Britain trained to identify and deal with nerve agents, it was a remarkable coincidence she was the one to administer first aid and give the 'correct' diagnose..

• The Skripals were feeding ducks with bread when they fell ill, allegedly from nerve agent on their hands. Despite giving some of the bread to a boy to feed the ducks, neither the boy (who ate some of the bread) nor the ducks died. Nor did Colonel Alison McCourt, who treated the patients for 30 minutes, experience any symptoms.

• At 17:10, they were taken separately to Salisbury District Hospital by an ambulance and an air ambulance, where they were treated for chemical weapons exposure.

• At 09:03 the following morning, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust declared a major incident in response to concerns raised by medical staff; shortly afterwards this became a multi-agency incident named Operation Fairline.

• The government claimed "nearly 40 people have experienced symptoms related to the Salisbury nerve agent,” but this was immediately contradicted by Dr. Steven Davies from the Salisbury District Hospital, in a letter to the Times. During the next few weeks and months, several hundred people who might have been in contact with the ultra-deadly nerve agent were checked, but no chemical weapons treatment were ever required.

• According to the British government narrative, two Russian citizens working for the Russian intelligence service GRU had gone on a day trip to Salisbury specifically to lace the doorknob on Sergei Skripal's hose with novichok, a deadly nerve agent.

Full article: Skripal Affair/Boshirov and Petrov in the UK

• The official story is that both the Skripals were poisoned by touching the home door handle, but then were well enough to go out to a pub, feed some ducks, and have a big lunch in a restaurant, before being instantly stricken and disabled, both at precisely the same time four hours later. In addition, this is a remarkably long reaction time for a fast acting, ultra deadly nerve agent.

• Sergei Skripal's house soon was sealed off, suspected of being laced with nerve agent, both inside and on the door knob. Conspicuously, the Salisbury police officers who were guarding the house did so without any protective equipment.

• Later in the evening, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey went to Sergei Skripal's house for some sort of unidentifed search. There, he allegedly was poisoned from the door knob, and had to be hospitalized. Other constables going to Skripal's house on later occasions were not affected.

• Original reports of fentanyl overdoses were redacted. (see section below).

• In yet a bizarre twist, when Skripal's house was sealed off, his two pet guinea pigs and cat were inside. A month later, the hamster was found starved to death, while the cat had to be put down due to its emaciated and distressed condition - also strongly indicating that no one had entered the house to investigate.

• The roof of Skripal's house was later removed at government expense , allegedly for being laced with nerve agent, and it is likely the whole house has been bought by the government. Also the home of Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was bought by the government, as was the home of Charley Rowley (see below).

• The poisoning of two drug addicts,Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, in Salisbury three months later was ascribed to novichok. This narrative has as many flaws as the Skripal one

Full article: 2018 Amesbury poisonings
.

• Apart from a brief video by Yulia and a statement, the Skripals have not been heard or seen publicly since, and have only had the briefest contact with their family in Russia. This includes no contact with Sergei's 90-year old mother/Yulia's grandmother, which they were close to.

Full article: Yulia Skripal

Borisov and Petrov

The British government soon pointed the finger at two Russian nationals, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Later releasing CCTV footage of the two walking around Salisbury on the day of the incident, proving that they were on two day trips from London to Salisbury, the British government never actually released any CCTV linking them to the alleged attack.

Four months after the police first searched the London hotel room of Borisov and Petrov, a new search found alleged traces of novichok there.

Full article: Skripal Affair/Boshirov and Petrov in the UK

Novichok

One of the many conspicuous holes in the British government narrative about the case is that despite the poison's alleged deadliness with only minute quantities, only one person died out of several dozen who allegedly came in contact, and that was three months later.

Full article: Novichok

A frequent talking point was that only Russia had access to this unique Soviet-era nerve agent, the government using weasel words like "of a type developed by Russia”. Over the next few months, it turned out several countries had made it at some stage or other, that the recipe was readily available and easy to make for chemists, and that novichok even was patented in the United States.

The invisible Pablo Miller

Pablo Miller was Sergei Skripal’s MI6 handler and also lived in Salisbury. Miller’s name was first mentioned in a report for the Telegraph in the days following the Skripal’s alleged poisoning, from which Miller’s name has now been totally removed.

It was later revealed that the UK government had issued a D-notice (a 'voluntary' media ban) on mentioning “Sergei Skripal’s MI6 handler”.

Miller also worked for Orbis Intelligence with Christopher Steele, author of the fabrications of the Trump/Russia golden shower dossier, paid for by the U.S. Democrats in an attempt to tarnish Trump with a revelation that involved the Russians and prostitutes. In this case, British spooks were found to be making it up, and the story was debunked within weeks.

Full article: Pablo Miller

British government actions

The British government very soon accused Russia of being directly responsible. On Monday 12th March 2018 British Prime Minister Theresa May gave Russia a 36 hour ultimatum saying that unless it proved itself innocent the British government would deem it guilty of the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

Despite being very assertive in their accusations, defence secretary Gavin Williamson stating Russia should just 'go away and shut up', senior politicians noticeably used weasel words to create a false impression of this.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson: "No doubt that agent is Novichok made in Russia"

In an interview 0n 19 March 2018, Conservative UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson talked about why the government believed Russia is responsible for the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and what lessons Britain learned from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Johnson might have received his talking points from a memo written by Chris Donnelly of the Integrity Intiative (see below)

Opposition Labour Party leaders like Diane Abbott were initially skeptic to the government assertions . Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Boris Johnson has "egg on his face" and "serious questions to answer".

Photoshopped illustration of how Colin Powell might have made the case against Putin, a reference to his lies to the UN about Iraq's WMDs.

OPCW analysis and leaked results

The British government asked the international Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to analyse its samples of novichok. The Russian government released leaked/hacked documents from OPCW that stated the sample was not novichok. The OPCW countered that the leaked/hacked result was from the control sample, and that the other samples gave a positive result. In this context, it is also worth considering that several OPCW-whistleblowers protesting the deeply biased investigation of alleged Syria revealed the OPCW to be not neutral, but in the pocket of Western governments.

UN Security Council

On 22 March, the UK government released a six-page slide presentation of 'Russian malign activities', including this Gish gallop of dubious or out-of-context accusations

On 13 March 2018 UK Prime Minister "Theresa May wrote to the Secretary-General of the United Nations accusing Russia of having ordered the attack in Salisbury, and convened an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, but where it refused any resolution which did not contain the expression that Russia was "probably responsible" for the attack.

NATO coordinated response

On 15 March, the UK briefed the North Atlantic Council (NATO). The 29 member states drew a link between the use of chemical weapons in Syria (the Douma incident) and the attack in Salisbury. They then decided that Russia was "probably" responsible for these two events. Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats, part of a coordinated expulsion of 153 Russian diplomats from other NATO/Western-countries. Noticeably, Chris Donnelly, leader of the Integrity Initiative, immediately had had suggested this solution.

On April 13, National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill also wrote a letter to NATO, thanking for the support.

• Among the many strange discrepancies in the case, the CIA-director showed president Donald Trump photographs of ducks dead from alleged novichok poisoning, to make him agree to sanctions against Russia, yet definitely no ducks died in Salisbury.

The Skripal Affair happened only a few weeks before the US, UK and France attacked the Syrian government with missiles over an (equally alleged) gas attack in Douma. Some observers pointed out how the whole Skripal Affair might have been an attempt to put Russia on the back foot before an escalation in Syria. John Ward "it took just over five weeks to go from largely unsubstantiated claims of a Russian nerve agent attack on a former spy in Britain to the air strike against the régime of Bashar al-Assad." Western offensives often are coordinated to coincide with international events (Beijing Olympics-War in Georgia 2008;Sochi/Russia Olympics 2014-Coup in Ukraine). The PR necessities around these events will hinder a hard response).

An additional UK motive might have been to sabotage the goodwill created around the Moscow 2018 World Cup in football, in July.

Corporate media

The UK commercially-controlled media, having received a D-Notice about the affair, were uncritical of the government line and did little reporting except for repeating the UK Deep state official narrative, an noticeable trend followed by press outlets in other NATO countries and international media relying on Western news agencies as a source for news.

UK media followed the government line

• Mark Urban is the BBC's diplomatic editor, and personally fronted much of the coverage of the Skripal case when it was breaking news. Mark Urban was in the same Royal Tank Regiment as Pablo Miller (see above), having joined at the same time. Urban revealed, months after the event, he had regularly been interviewing Sergei Skripal in the months and weeks before his alleged poisoning, claiming it was for a book.

Integrity Initiative

The Skripal Affair happened to occur shortly after a massive increase in the Integrity Initiative’s budget and activity, which itself was a small part of a British Government decision to ramp up a major information war against Russia.

An appendix of The Operation Iris document showing dissenting voices from the official narrative of the Skripal case - referred to as "Troll accounts"

The Integrity Initiative/Institute for Statecraft are not known to have carried out any investigation into what actually happened in Salisbury, but were intensely interested in reporting of the Skripal Case and commissioned Operation Iris from Harod Associates, a review of social media reporting about the incident. Of particular note is that the email address of Pablo Miller, Skripal's handler, was on an II list that was leaked.

Leaked/hacked Integrity Initiative documents also showed that it also snooped on Dr. Davies from the Salisbury hospital (see above), presumably to if necessary discredit him.

Alternative Media dismantles the UK narrative

The UK public were more sceptical of the official narrative. Web traffic to several UK-based alternative websites increased as the Skripal affair unfolded, including Craig Murray's blog, Wikispooks and 21st Century Wire‎ and numerous others (see list of sample articles at bottom of page).

Also Russian media, including the English-speaking editions of RT and Sputnik News which let dissident western journalists like Kit Klarenberg work freely, pointed to many holes in the British narrative.

John Helmer wrote in 2020 that

“Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government’s allegation that Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention. Investigations in Vienna by four Austrian government ministries, the BVT intelligence agency, and by Austrian prosecutors have revealed that secret OPCW reports on the blood testing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, copies of which were transferred to the Austrian government, did not reveal a Russian-made nerve agent.”
 (July 2020) 

Russian government and media handling of the case

Although the British government narrative was quickly torn to pieces independent media, the Russian government failed to sufficiently shed light on certain subjects, noticeably the identities of of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.

RT's exclusive interview with Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov on the Skripal poisoning case in Salisbury.

• On 13 April 2018, Russian Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko published a comprehensive report of the Skripal Affair entitled "Salisbury: A Classified Case", which he updated on 28 June 2018.

Russian President Vladimir Putin opined on the case in an interview with the Financial Times on 27 June 2019: : "Listen, all this fuss about spies and counterspies, it is not worth serious interstate relations. This spy story, as we say, it is not worth five kopecks. Or even five pounds, for that matter," he said. "And the issues concerning interstate relations, they are measured in billions and the fate of millions of people. How can we compare one with the other?"

"The average person listens and says, "Who are these Skripals?" And it turns out that Skripal was engaged in espionage against us (Russia). So this person asks the next question, "Why did you spy on us using Skripal? Maybe you should not have done that?" You know, these questions are infinite," Putin noted. "We need to just leave it alone and let security agencies deal with it."

"As a matter of fact, treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it. Not at all. But traitors must be punished"..."This gentleman, Skripal, had already been punished. He was arrested, sentenced and then served time in prison. He received his punishment. For that matter, he was off the radar. Why would anybody be interested in him? He got punished. He was detained, arrested, sentenced and then spent five years in prison. Then he was released and that was it."

Fentanyl poisoning?

Skripals poisoned by Fentanyl?

On 21 January 2019, it was revealed in the Forces Network journal that Abigail McCourt, the teenage daughter of Chief Nursing Officer of the British Army Alison McCourt was the first person to notice the Skripal father and daughter slumped on a park bench, and tried to give them first aid. Neither mother nor daughter, nor members of their family were treated for effects of contact with nerve agent.

On admission to Salisbury hospital nursing staff undertook treatment for Fentanyl poisoning of Yulia and Sergei. This was confirmed on March 5th in the Clinical Services Journal. The article was subsequently doctored to remove the reference to treatment for Fentanyl poisoning. Fortunately some took screenshots of the original article for reference future reference. None of the staff at Salisbury Hospital were treated for contact with the deadly nerve agent Novichok.

Fentanyl, a very strong opiate had made inroads into the drug culture in the area, and was also the subject of a Salisbury Journal article written on the day of the poisoning, 4th March 2018. It stated: "Emergency services suspect the powerful drug fentanyl - a synthetic opiate 50-100 times stronger than heroin - may have been involved."

Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley

On 8 July 2018, three months after the original incident, the habitual drug user Dawn Sturgess died. According to the British government version of events the cause of death was exposure to Novichok. Her partner Charlie Rowley, who was also taken ill, recovered after treatment in hospital. The poisoning happened from a sealed perfume bottle Rowley had picked up from a charity bin, that allegedly contained left-over Novichok from the assasination attempt three months earlier.

After the poisoning, the Police cordoned off Charlie Rowley’s home and began a search for “Novichok”, in an attitude of extreme urgency because it was believed this poison was out amidst the public. They were specifically searching for a small phial of liquid. Yet it took 11 days of the search before they allegedly discovered the “novichok” in a perfume bottle sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter – and only after they had discovered the clue of the perfume bottle package in the bin the day before, after ten days of search.

Full article: 2018 Amesbury poisonings

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Institute for Statecraft/Secrecy	“Implementing discernment and media literacy training prog. (using Skripal as a case-study). Activity: £90k Ben Robinson, Yusuf Desai, Greg Rowett (Tallinn University, Chester University) Teachers Unions?”		30 May 2018
Craig Murray	“We have a programme, the Integrity Initiative, whose entire purpose is to pump out covert disinformation against Russia, through social media and news stories secretly paid for by the British government. And we have the Skripals’ MI6 handler, the BBC, Porton Down, the FCO, the MOD and the US Embassy, working together in a group under the auspices of the Integrity Initiative. The Skripal Case happened to occur shortly after a massive increase in the Integrity Initiative’s budget and activity, which itself was a small part of a British Government decision to ramp up a major information war against Russia. I find that very interesting indeed.”	Craig Murray	21 December 2018
OffGuardian	“The BBC’s new drama “The Salisbury Poisonings” concluded over the weekend. A three-part story “based on actual events”, claiming to tell the story of the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Schlocky tat. Poorly researched, badly written and woefully factually inaccurate. The Guardian gave it four stars. Because of course they did. Because when you’re dealing with government-backed narrative everything that reinforces it must be described as having value. It’s one of the hallmarks of propaganda, that no story which supports the propaganda – however ridiculous – can ever be questioned, criticised or disputed. There’s room for an in-depth review, and indeed Craig Murray has done a fine job deconstructing the series. But here, I just want to focus on everything they don’t tell you.”	OffGuardian	19 June 2020
Orbis Business Intelligence	“The @Telegraph story claiming a link between Sergei #Skripal and Christopher Steele's company Orbis is wrong, I understand. Skripal had nothing to do with Trump dossier. Skripal had nothing to do with Trump dossier.”	Luke Harding	2018
Paschalidis Panagiotis	“The most common characteristic of the news stories found in the Greek newspapers is the insistence on the factual aspects of the story... quite understandable since in most cases the news stories of the Greek newspapers are composed by the information provided by news agencies... the strong pro-Russian sentiment in the Greek public opinion seems to have influenced the Greek newspapers not to emphasize Russia’s involvement.”	Paschalidis Panagiotis	March 2018
Mark Urban	“Mark Urban’s piece for Newsnight tonight was simply disgusting; it did not even pretend to be more than a propaganda piece on behalf of the security services, who had told Urban (as he said) that Yulia Skripal's phone “could have been” tapped by the Russians and they “might even” have listened to her conversations through the microphone in her telephone. That was the “new evidence” that the Russians were behind everything. As a former British Ambassador I can tell you with certainty that indeed the Russians might have tapped Yulia, but GCHQ most definitely would have. It is, after all, their job, and billions of our taxes go into it. If tapping of phones is seriously presented as evidence of intent to murder, the British government must be very murderous indeed.”	Craig Murray Mark Urban	5 July 2018

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:British Skripal Narrative Fails the Occam's Razor Every Step of the Way	blog post	26 September 2018	Rob Slane	Occam’s Verdict: Where is Sergei? He’s either dead, or he can’t be prevailed upon to make a statement backing up the official narrative, because he knows it isn’t true.
Document:FCO Disinformation update: Salisbury and Syria	review	26 December 2018	Integrity Initiative Andy Pryce	UK Foreign Office email, presumably to trusted pro-government journalists, with information as 'background for your own work'. Cliff notes on Douma, Skripal etc.
Document:II Network Skripal	report	21 March 2018	Simon Bracey-Lane	media feedback from II members in smaller countries to HQ in London in Skripal affair
Document:Ideas for Ramping up IfS Contributions to the Cause	strategy document	16 March 2018	Victor Madeira	Outline of the Ifs-parts of a big covert propaganda campaign to synchronize and spread the British narrative ('the Cause') in the Skripal case.
Document:Metropolitan Police on 'Chepiga' and 'Mishkin'	blog post	12 October 2018	Craig Murray	I remain of the view that the best way forward would be for Putin to negotiate conditions under which Boshirov and Petrov might voluntarily come to the UK for trial
Document:Notes from colleagues in the Baltic States who are monitoring Russia carefully	Wikispooks Page	18 March 2018	Integrity Initiative	A document from the Integrity Initiative Leak which asserts that "A criminal investigation [into the Skripal affair] alone will not throw these essential clues up, and is unlikely to yield sufficient judicial evidence We need to be looking at, and explaining, this attack from a political and military-intelligence perspective. That means educating our audience to understand how Russia sees this world as being at war."
Document:Novichok Part Deux: A Fusion of Media, Government & Military	Article	10 July 2018	Kenny Coyle	BBC diplomatic and defence correspondent Mark Urban revealed this week that he had in fact been meeting secretly with Sergei Skripal over a year ago.
Document:Novichok, Navalny, Nordstream, Nonsense	blog post	3 September 2020	Craig Murray	The US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a split between Germany and Russia at this time. Navalny is certainly a victim of international politics. That he is a victim of Putin I tend to doubt.
Document:Probable Western Responsibility for Skripal Poisoning	blog post	28 April 2018	Craig Murray Clive Ponting	Those of us who have been in the belly of the beast and have worked closely with the intelligence services, really do know what they and the British government are capable of. They are not “white knights”.
Document:Russia, Novichok and the long tradition of British government misinformation	article	12 April 2018	David Miller
Document:Russian Lies and the Skripal Case	strategy document	10 March 2018	Chris Donnelly SPCD	II document describing the backstory to the British narrative of the Sergei Skripal incident
Document:Salisbury Incident - Skripal Case Investigators Could Learn From The Lockerbie Affair	Article	24 September 2018	Ludwig De Braeckeleer	Porton Down has been renamed many times: RARDE, DERA, Dstl, but it's still the same damn place.
Document:Sergei Skripal - "I wanted a life outside Russia"	Article	28 September 2018	Mark Urban	Adapted from "The Skripal Files, The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy" by Mark Urban, to be published by Macmillan on 4 October 2018 at £20
Document:Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?	strategy document	11 March 2018	Chris Donnelly	Donnelly creates an overarching narrative, and then makes a list of British punitive measures and a PR-campaign against Russia for the the Skripal Affair
Document:Skripal roundup 21.3.18	Wikispooks Page	21 March 2018		some twitter reactions on the Skripal Case, half from known Integrity Initiative members
Document:Social Media Investigation and Monitoring Proposal - Subject Poisoning of Sergei Skripal	program proposal	15 March 2018	Greg Rowett	Establish the flow across social media of the messaging, and establish key influencers, friendly and anti, to HMG.
Document:Sputnik Gatecrashes Launch of Mark Urban's Book 'The Skripal Files'	Article	5 October 2018	Kit Klarenberg Johanna Ross	Sputnik Gatecrashes Launch of Mark Urban's Book 'The Skripal Files'
Document:Spy behind Donald Trump 'golden shower' dossier feared president had been 'compromised by foreign power'	Article	10 January 2018	James Law	"It's political rhetoric to call the dossier phoney. The memos are field reports of real interviews that Chris's network conducted and there's nothing phoney about it. We can argue about what's prudent and what's not, but it's not a fabrication."
Document:Stephen Donald Lewis Davies @ GMC	snooping on doctor	20 March 2018	Integrity Initiative	Screenshot of II checking out Dr. Stephen Davies of Salisbury Hospital, who wrote a letter to the Times disputing the official narrative. See Skripal Affair
Document:The Four Horsemen Gallop By	blog post	11 April 2018	Craig Murray	The notion that Britain will take part in military action against Syria with neither investigation of the evidence nor a parliamentary vote is worrying indeed. Without Security Council authorisation, any such action is illegal in any event.
Document:The Salisbury Poisoning One Year On - An Open Letter to the Metropolitan Police	open letter		Rob Slane
Document:The World: What is Really Happening	blog post	25 May 2019	Craig Murray	Alleged nerve gas attack in Syria - Amanda Martin tweets to George Monbiot: "Don't you smell a set up here though? Craig Murray doesn't think Assad did it."
Document:Where They Tell You Not to Look	blog post	30 April 2018	Craig Murray	Craig Murray's rule number one of real investigative journalism: 1. Look Where They Tell You Not to Look
Document:‘No slither of evidence’ against Russia over Skripal attack, George Galloway tells RT	Video	28 March 2018	George Galloway	George Galloway concludes: "The OPCW, which is currently examining samples of the nerve agent used against the Skripals, will presumably be lent upon to obfuscate the outcome. No one will ever know the truth.”
Document:“Former Russian Spy Sergei Skripal May Have Been Poisoned by BZ Nerve Agent”	blog post	16 April 2018	Ludwig De Braeckeleer	Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “Former Russian Spy Sergei Skripal May Have Been Poisoned by BZ Nerve Agent”

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