After Yulia Skripal has testified through her doctor that she was attacked with a poison spray in a restaurant minutes before she and her father, Sergei Skripal, collapsed on March 4, 2018, the British Government hearings on what happened have attempted to suppress her evidence.
Yesterday, December 2, the hearings ended with a statement by Jack Holborn, a lawyer paid by the Home Office to say he represents the Skripals, and to claim they agree to the suppression of their own evidence. “Sergei and Yulia Skripal are grateful to this Inquiry for its work,” Holborn said. “Thank you.” Page 158
The retired judge who has directed the hearings, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley – lead image), let slip in his closing statement that he understands the Skripals are dead or incommunicado in prison because he omitted to thank them for their participation. “I am grateful,” Hughes said, “to all the Core Participants and chiefly, of course, to those most closely connected to the events, namely Dawn Sturgess’ family, who have coped, if I may say so, admirably with what must have been at times extremely difficult evidence to listen to.”
Only the Skripals were closer to the events than the Sturgess family or the ambulance crews, police, intelligence agents, doctors, and government officials who have been called to testify on their oaths. But Hughes ruled on September 23 that the Skripals were not allowed to testify either in the open hearing room, behind closed doors, or by remote internet link.
Hughes’s expression of his gratitude to everyone associated with the Novichok narrative except for the Skripals means he is burying them.
Holborn has been seconding Andrew Deakin KC (right), a lawyer also paid by the Home Office to represent the Skripals. Neither of them has asked questions of any witness nor made submissions throughout the eight weeks of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry hearings. Deakin’s opening statement on October 14 lasted 88 seconds. “Both Sergei and Yulia Skripal,” Deakin said, “would like to express their sorrow at the death of Dawn Sturgess and to offer their deepest sympathies to her family and loved ones. Sergei and Yulia Skripal also express their sympathy to those who were injured in the course of this incident. Finally, Sergei and Yulia would like to express their profound gratitude to the emergency workers, police and hospital staff who risked their lives to help them. Sergei and Yulia keenly await the outcome of this Inquiry. They look forward to better understanding the circumstances of the Salisbury attack, to considering the Inquiry’s conclusions as to who was responsible for that attack and to being able to move on with their lives.” Page 156-57
Deakin did not appear again.
In open testimony at the Inquiry it has been revealed that Yulia Skripal’s doctor at the Salisbury District Hospital, Stephen Cockroft, discovered she had recovered consciousness on March 8, four days after the attack. The police evidence to the Inquiry is that Skripal then communicated by eye signals to Cockroft that she remembered being sprayed, not at home but at Zizzi’s Restaurant where she and her father had been lunching just before they collapsed.
The senior police source for this evidence was Keith Asman; he is the chief of forensics for the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTPSE) group which in the investigation of the Novichok affair has combined the Metropolitan and regional police forces with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5). In his witness statement, Asman repeated what another police officer, code-named VN104, had recorded from Dr Cockroft. The evidence of Detective Inspector (DI) VN104, identified as the deputy head of the Metropolitan Police investigating Novichok, was not called into open or closed testimony by Hughes.
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ006140_strong-compression.pdf
Asman’s record of this signalling sequence was cut short before Yulia responded to Cockroft to indicate if she had recognized the nationality or the name of the attacker. Whether she knew the person who had sprayed her or not, her response has been excised from the record on Hughes’s orders.
Asman knows what Yulia signalled, and so does Cockroft. But they aren’t saying because Hughes has forbidden them to do so.
Left: the exterior and interior of Zizzi’s Restaurant in the Salisbury city centre were sealed off by police from March 5, 2018; CCTV video footage confiscated and kept secret or destroyed. Right: for more details of the suppression by Hughes of the Skripal blink-of-an-eye evidence, click to read.
Asman continued in his witness statement: “78. At this point Yulia Skripal was described as being emotional and fell unconscious. I made notes of my conversation with DI VN104 in one of my notebooks, and in addition this information was confirmed to me in writing the next morning. 79. The information she provided about being sprayed at the restaurant was seemingly inconsistent with the presence of novichok at the Mill public house and 47 Christie Miller Road. On hearing this, I personally wondered whether Yulia Skripal knew more about it than she had alluded to and therefore whilst being fully cognisant of the SIO’s [Senior Investigating Officer] hypothesis and the need to be open-minded [I] continued to prioritise her property.”
During his appearance at the hearing on November 14, Hughes stopped Asman and the Inquiry lawyer from probing any further into Yulia Skripal’s evidence. Asman added: “I wasn’t sure whether Yulia had wittingly or unwittingly been involved and at the point I think for the final question where she cries when asked who did it, I did wonder to myself if she was crying because she felt maybe she had been identified, so it didn’t change my initial thought process about whether she may or may not have been involved in it and apart from that, nothing else at all. Q. You were still following the forensics as that – A. Absolutely. It was information to have but not necessarily going to change my approach on anything.”
Hughes interjected. “Well, you see she didn’t. If the record that you were given there is right, someone [sic] suggested to her ‘Had you been sprayed’. She didn’t come up with it herself.”
None of the records of police questioning of Yulia or Sergei Skripal — revealed during the hearings in unsigned, unwitnessed, excerpted, and redacted form – reports questioning of what they had meant by the evidence in the blink of an eye. If Yulia Skripal had recognized the restaurant attacker as British, not Russian, she would have understood that, although they had survived the poison, both she and her father were doomed.
Craig Murray has recently broadcast his belief that at lunch with the Skripals at Zizzi’s Restaurant on March 4, 2018, there was the MI6 agent Pablo Miller whom the Skripals had known well over many years – Sergei since 1996, Yulia since 2010. No other source corroborates Miller’s presence at the fateful lunch; there has been no reporting of Miller’s presence in the mainstream or alt-media since 2018. Murray has been asked to substantiate his belief; he has not replied.
Miller (presumed photograph, right) had been one of the MI6 group which had initially recruited Sergei Skripal in 1996 to become a double agent for British intelligence; Miller’s cover name at the time was Richard Bagnall. Over the next eight years Skripal delivered an estimated eighteen batches of Russian material to MI6; he received a little less than $100,000 in cash payments and the promise of a safe-haven house in England.
In Moscow in December 2004, Skripal was arrested, interrogated for two years, and then sent to trial in 2006. He was convicted and sentenced to prison for thirteen years. In July 2010 he was released to go to the UK in a spy swap.
Although the British Government has issued a D-Notice to the media not to publish Miller’s names and role in the Skripal case, this was voluntary — only the BBC, the Guardian and other British media supporting the official narrative of a Russian Novichok attack complied. Read the book for the full Miller-Bagnall story and the break Skripal appears to have made with MI6 in the summer of 2017.
Left: Dr Stephen Cockroft, the witness of Yulia Skripal’s evidence from her hospital bed on March 8, 2018, that the attack against her and her father had taken place in Zizzi’s Restaurant, which led within minutes to her collapse, alongside her father, on a bench outside the restaurant. Centre: Hughes, the presiding judge who barred direct Skripal testimony and then silenced the Skripal evidence from Keith Asman; Asman’s face was concealed during his appearance at the hearing of November 14, 2024; watch Hughes stop the evidence from Minute 2:01. Published in February 2020, Skripal in Prison is the only book to document the fabrications of the Novichok story and the propaganda on the UK’s road to war against Russia. Compared to other western journalism, the Skripal case has had a far wider, deeper, and longer-lasting impact than Julian Assange’s Wikileaks. Unlike Assange, the Skripals have not survived their incarceration.
On March 19, 2018, ten days after Cockroft’s exchange with Yulia Skripal, Cockroft changed his evidence under duress of threats from the Salisbury hospital management, the police and security services. He said: “I felt that if she could remember if something had happened and given the nature of her father’s background, she may be laying there thinking that we don’t have a clue what has actually happened to her. I wanted to make a point of telling her that we knew she had be poisoned, that we knew what it was and that she was getting the right treatment to get her better. I did not get much of a response from Yulia to this, she may well have drifted off. I would have asked the general questions first and I then went on and asked her if she remembered anything about the incident on Sunday, I got the impression she nodded or shook her head, but 1 cannot say which for sure. I asked her did someone attack you, I did not get a response to that, I asked did someone spray something in your face, did someone throw something at you? Something along those lines. I didn’t get a response to that either.”
The witness to Cockroft’s signature on this statement was code-named VN314. The police who interviewed Cockroft, including the detective inspector VN104, who relayed what he had said earlier to Asman, have been concealed.
In the interval between what Cockroft had witnessed with Yulia and what he told the police, the doctor had been removed from Skripal’s case and threatened that unless he kept silent, there would be further professional and financial sanctions by the hospital acting on government orders. The doctor went silent. Yulia Skripal was silenced by an induced coma and a tracheostomy.
Cockroft signed a new witness statement for the Hughes proceeding on July 18, 2024. “I tried to reassure Yulia that she was safe, as was her father,” he now claimed. “I had absolutely no idea what they had both experienced on that fateful Sunday 4 March 2018 and had no idea if they had been attacked or would have had any knowledge or insight into the events that had led to their hospital admission. During those few minutes I asked Yulia if she had any recollection of her and her father being assaulted in some way. Fortunately, after some five minutes, she was safely sedated and support of her breathing could be re-established.”
The crucial “five minutes” are now missing, concealed from Cockroft’s evidence. Read more of the details here.
During Asman’s and Cockroft’s testimony, Skripal’s lawyers Deakin and Holborn failed to respond to any of this evidence, and its powerful conclusion that it had been British assassins, not Russians, who had been responsible for the alleged Novichok attack. The two lawyers have prevented their purported client from explaining what her eyes had been blinking when she remembered the attack, and why her eyes were crying.
In his concluding statement on December 2, Holborn stood up for 45 seconds, half the time Deakin had used on October 14, and repeated many of Deakin’s words. According to Holborn, “both Sergei and Yulia Skripal would like to express again their sorrow at the death of Dawn Sturgess and offer their deepest sympathies to her family and friends. The Skripals also express their sympathies to those who were injured in the course of the incidents. They would like to express their profound gratitude to the emergency workers, police and hospital staff who risked their lives to help them. Sergei and Yulia Skripal are grateful to this Inquiry for its work. Thank you.”
Jack Holborn, the state-appointed representative of the Skripals, rises and falls at the final public hearing on December 2.Watch the video here. Minute 1:44 et seq.
Holborn was so nervous in saying how grateful the Skripals were for the Inquiry’s “work”, he failed to memorize the words. Instead, he read them from a prepared script.
