The British Government’s investigation of the alleged Novichok attacks against Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which they survived, and Dawn Sturgess, who died, has now run for six and half years. The public presentation of evidence and witnesses has completed its first week; the second week of hearings will begin next Monday, October 28. The hearings will end in the first week of December. A report of the conclusions will follow months later.
The judge presiding is a retired Court of Appeal judge named Anthony Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Omberseley – is also a consultant lawyer. Hughes advertises that he is available for engagement on private cases at his London office, telephone +44 (0)20 7242 3555.
His terms of engagement from the Home Office, his job now, is to manage the Government’s two imperatives. The first is to protect the British government narrative to ensure no one disbelieves the Russians did it, as then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson announced on the BBC on March 17, 2018.
Judge Hughes’s website claims he is presiding in “an independent Inquiry into the circumstances of Dawn Sturgess’ death in Salisbury on 8 July 2018.” Independent of Russia is certain. Hughes opened the proceeding on March 25, 2022 by saying: “The issues raised by the terms of reference include those of the utmost gravity, including the allegation which has been publicly made of Russian state responsibility for the killing of Ms Sturgess indirectly.” In fact, the terms of reference make no such allegation.
Hughes then announced he had appointed Emilie Pottle, a London lawyer, to represent three Russian military officers whom the British prosecutor has charged with attempted murder. Married to a “freelance writer” who has worked in the Iraqi and Libyan warzones with UK and US forces, Pottle is being paid by the Home Office to appear. Last week as a Crown prosecutor, she fed leading questions to medical and police witnesses.
The judge’s assisting lawyer, Mark O’Connor QC revealed last week that he has concluded what has to be proved, and expects witnesses to do the same. “I want”, O’Connor asked Wayne Darch, deputy director of the regional ambulance service and supervisor of the medics who attended the Skripals and Sturgess, “to start, if I may, with the question of what understanding or training ambulance staff had of or for nerve agent, organophosphate poisoning before the Skripal poisoning in March 2018, and we will work then forward in the chronology, okay?”
Working forward in the chronology means, for the British government, that the Hughes proceeding will work backward to prove retrospectively that the Russian government ordered and carried out the Novichok assassination plot of 2018. So far, not a single British newspaper, television or social medium has reported differently.
The second imperative for Hughes is to protect the British Government from the case for negligence which the Sturgess family lawyer, Michael Mansfield KC, is making to support his claim for a multi-million pound payout for compensation of their loss to the Sturgess family, her boyfriend Charles Rowley, and to Mansfield himself and his associated lawyers. The first attempt at Mansfield’s legal strategy of “dosh for Dawn’s death” did not succeed in the High Court in mid-2020. The Hughes proceeding is Mansfield’s last, big chance.to accuse the British secret services of culpable negligence in failing to anticipate the Russian strike against Sergei Skripal on March 4, 2018, and to protect the British public from the Novichok fallout the alleged Russian assassins left behind.
The contradiction between the first and second imperatives grows obvious with every session. The quality of the evidence of Russian Novichok runs from weak to preposterous; the legal presentation from tendentious to inadmissible. But to earn his ransom Mansfield must accept as true what he cannot prove to be lies. He and his money-shot are motivated by the legal principle known as claim of right – you can’t steal from a thief.
Follow the evidence of what happened to the Skripals and to Sturgess as the events occurred and as government officials and the police tried to explain them, in the only book of the case to be published. Since the book’s publication in February 2020, the archive of the case developments, new evidence, new coverup attempts, and coroners and judges replacing each other has appeared here.
Source: https://johnhelmer.net/
The only secret service evidence so far to appear in court was presented on the second day of the public hearings by MD39, a name kept secret because it belongs to a 25-year veteran of MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, who described himself as “a senior leader within MI5’s Counter State Threats branch.”
“The purpose of this statement,” the MI5 officer wrote in his witness statement tabled in court, “is to address the nature and extent of M15’s investigation into the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, and latterly Ms Sturgess, and its liaison with the parallel police investigations… Although I was not directly involved in the events described below, I am well placed to provide this statement on behalf of M15…As I have outlined above, I cannot go into specific detail about what intelligence M15 obtained, nor when this was received and/or shared with the police though the course of the post-incident investigation. I can however say that, throughout, MI5 supported the police in all aspects of their investigation, including through the provision of intelligence and assessment, which ultimately enabled the police to bring charges against Alexander Petrov, Ruslan Boshirov and Sergey Fedotov.”
MI5’s head, Ken McCallum, announced on October 8: : “The UK’s leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime, and we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home. The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness. And having precisely the opposite effect to what the Russian state intends, in driving increased operational coordination with partners across Europe and beyond. This concerted campaign requires a strong and sustained response. We’re working with the police to use the new National Security Act to its fullest extent.” McCallum was born and educated in Scotland in 1974; he has never been employed outside MI5.
MI5’s MD39 was not questioned directly. Instead, Hughes’s assisting lawyer asked a subordinate regional police commander to confirm that in their testimony he and MI5 had been “as transparent as possible, but I must emphasise at the outset that there remains a level of detail that I cannot address without risking serious harm to national security.” “Yes, absolutely” replied the policeman. “Commander Murphy,” he was then asked, “can you confirm that there was indeed a covert investigation from your knowledge? A. I can, yes.”
Who was running whom, MI5 or the regional police, was the line of questioning, as the judge’s counsel tried to show that the two forces had collaborated in order to exclude any oversight or negligence from the time of the Skripal attack in March and Sturgess’s death three months later. “Q. At paragraph 14 MD39 gives slightly more information about what the police did and what MI5 did in this particular case: ‘… the police led on ensuring public safety, the prevention of further attacks, evidence gathering to support executive action and ensuring public confidence and reassurance, including delivering public communications in relation to the incident.’ Do you agree with that? A. Yes, that’s correct.”
“Q. MI5 led on the: ‘… gathering and exploitation, assessment and dissemination of intelligence to support the post-incident investigation.’ Is that correct? A. ‘While a large proportion of the investigation involved covert activities and collection of intelligence, some simultaneous overt activities were conducted by police, including large-scale CCTV retrieval and public appeals for assistance.” Again, is that right? A. Yes, that’s right. In essence that is us sharing information from our investigative activity back with MI5 to ensure that we’ve got that two-way sharing to make joint assessments of what we do next.”
This is a record of secret claims from one witness accepted by Hughes as admissible evidence on hearsay by a witness man – without cross-examination by Pottle, the purported legal representative of the accused Russians, or by O’Connor, the lead advocate of the independent inquiry, or by the judge. Hughes limited himself to this exchange with his assisting counsel:
“LORD HUGHES (right): Where are you please, Ms Whitelaw?
MS WHITELAW: In fact because I am all over the [witness] statement now –
LORD HUGHES: All right, that’s fine.”
The hearing was adjourned shortly after.
Christopher Black, one of Canada’s leading lawyers in international war crimes cases, was asked to comment on the legality of the Sturgess proceeding. “It is remarkable, first, that Pottle is allowed to act for the Inquiry as a de facto prosecutor when she has a conflict of interest since she acted for the Russians prior. But then there are no Russians there to complain about it. Second, her questioning of the ambulance man is improper. It would not be allowed in a criminal trial. The witness should be asked what did they observe and do, from their memory. A witness can only refer to notes made beforehand if the lawyer goes through the procedure of asking the witness if the made notes; then if yes, do they need them to refresh their memory as to events. If yes, then the witness can refer to the notes themselves when answering questions. But that is not what is done here. Instead, they have entered the ambulance man’s statement to police as an exhibit and are using that as evidence instead of his own recall of events, and it is curious that he does not remember a number of things in the statement. So, this lawyer is essentially cross-examining her own witness by leading him through the statement and getting him to say yes or no with some explanations.”
“On the other hand, this is not a trial, but an inquiry, so the rules of evidence and procedure have been relaxed — that is to say, ignored. And of course there is no one for the Russians there to object to any of this.”
By English criminal law and by international law standards, the medical evidence of the ambulance medics who responded to the calls for help for Sturgess and boyfriend Rowley is inconclusive on the key question – what caused her death in her apartment before the ambulances and local police arrived on June 30, 2018. A heavily redacted police intelligence analysis, reported on July 15, 2018, by the Counter Terrorism Policing Unit identified a “contaminant” in the Sturgess home but did not identify what it was. The report – only the first and fifth of its eleven pages have been released — could not explain why Sturgess went into cardiac arrest and died within 15 minutes of contamination; why Rowley failed to show symptoms after his contact with the contaminant, from his mouth to mouth resuscitation of Sturgess and from other direct contact he had with her body fluids. The police report said “it is highly likely [sic] that this contaminated item was something [sic] in the bathroom or one of STURGESS’ personal possessions.”
Sic marks the guesswork on July 15, 2018, seven days after Sturgess was declared officially dead at Salisbury Hospital, and five days after the alleged Russian Novichok had been discovered on a kitchen table in the house. The police intelligence analysis, coordinated with MI5, concluded: “this assessment is consistent [sic] with the discovery [sic] of a contaminated perfume bottle within the flat. ROWLEY confirms that he picked up the bottle as a gift for STURGESS.”
The report omits to acknowledge that the perfume bottle had not been discovered by thorough searches of the house, including the bathroom, kitchen and living room, by several teams of police who followed after the responding ambulance men had conducted their own searches.
In the ambulance records and witness statements of the first medics to reach Sturgess, she was clinically dead – no pulse, no blood pressure, no breathing, “AVPU [Alert, Voice, Pain, Unresponsive]”. On the official timeline evidence, this was at least 30 minutes after contamination at about 10 am. In the testimony of Mark Marriott, the first ambulanceman to arrive, Sturgess was dead; Rowley was showing no symptoms. “‘When did she collapse? [Marriott asked Rowley]’ he replied ‘Ten fifteen minutes ago’, he was a bit flustered, he seemed a bit jiddery, a bit muddled in himself. Nothing else about him concerned me. I assessed this, and found what he had disclosed was consistent of being a fit, but at this point, the cause of the Cardiac Arrest was still unknown.”
Marriott saw no perfume bottle in the bathroom: “The bathroom was quite sparse…The walls to the bathroom were magnolia in colour, the toilet and bath were white. I don’t recall what other items were inside the bathroom, in respect of toiletries, there were some items on the floor, but I don’t remember what they were.”
Marriott reported that he asked Rowley if he wanted to get into the ambulance and accompany Sturgess to Salisbury Hospital. Rowley refused and went off with a companion. In retrospect, it is now known that Rowley took narcotic drugs during the hours which followed.
A second medic, Keith Coomber, followed Marriott and testified to what he saw, did, heard, and and found while trying to revive Sturgess. “I said ‘Has she taken drugs’ and the boyfriend [Rowley] came to the hallway and said ‘No drugs but she is an alcoholic’.” Rowley and the Sturgess family have subsequently denied this. The Sturgess toxicology test reports prepared by Salisbury Hospital staff and by the post-mortem pathologists remain secret.
The ambulance medics who returned to the address at 18:47 in the evening of June 30, 2018, responding to a call for Rowley, testified that they made thorough searches of the bathroom and kitchen, opening cupboards. They reported finding prepared syringes and other drug paraphernalia; they did not report finding a perfume bottle.
“Ian had asked if we could see any drug paraphernalia in the property, which I [ambulanceman Paul Channon] hadn’t seen, so I decided to have a look around to see if there was any. I could not see anything in the lounge area so started opening all the drawers and cupboards I could see. In the cupboard on the left hand side of the kitchens window, I found a connected and opened syringe and needle that appeared either used or ready for use. There were also a couple of other syringes, although I am not sure exactly how many.”
The ambulance crew was with Rowley at the house for two and a half hours. Rowley denied taking drugs. The toxicology reports prepared after his admission to hospital remain secret.
In his appearance on the fifth day of hearings on October 18, Channon, the first medic responder to Rowley, was asked leading questions by the Inquiry lawyer, Francesca Whitelaw KC:
“Q. You may have seen — we have seen this document in evidence before. I just wanted to confirm with you – you indicated that you looked in the kitchen in a cupboard to the left of the window sill, so is that below the star there where we see –
A. Where the micro, yes –
Q.– and the perfume box; was that the cupboard where you saw the syringes?
A. I believe so, yes.
Q. Did you do anything with them or did you just leave them there?
A. No, I saw them there and at that point it was beneficial to aid us that this may be someone that uses intravenous drugs.”
Channon the ambulanceman did not say he had seen a perfume bottle in the kitchen. Whitelaw, the Home Office lawyer engaged to assist the “independent inquiry”, said it.
A leading British expert in organophorus poisoning was asked to review the medical evidence given to date and to say if the symptoms presented by Sturgess were those of a Novichok-type victim. He replied: “The responders seem to have done a capable job of at least getting Dawn’s heart going. 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale is not good, and who knows the extent of brain damage. We await the SDH [Salisbury District Hospital] evidence, if we are allowed to hear it all.”
Next week two doctors will be called to give evidence on their treatment of the Skripals, as well as of Sturgess and Rowley. James Haslam is scheduled to appear – but not in the 10-minute delayed Youtube broadcast – along with Stephen Cockcroft. Haslam, the head of the Radnor Intensive Care Ward at the Salisbury hospital, has already testified publicly – in a military co-authored and vetted publication — that he is unsure what the poison source had been in the patients he treated. He referred to no toxicology evidence, and he refused to answer questions when asked in June 2020.
Source: https://johnhelmer.net/
Cockcroft, the second scheduled medical witness next week, is unknown. There is no previous record of his testifying on the Skripal and Sturgess cases in the press or elsewhere. This was the nurse and doctor group in charge of Sergei and Yulia Skripal at Salisbury Hospital – Stephen Jukes was the lead doctor: Jukes was the hospital witness at the High Court protection hearing to authorize the testing of the Skripals by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in March 2018.
Cockcroft’s name has not surfaced in the coroner’s hearings since 2018 or in the Hughes proceeding since 2022. He was not in the Radnor Ward medical team at SDH. His current curriculum vitae indicates that he was at Salisbury Hospital between 1994 and 2020, and is now at another hospital.
So far, the two Home Office pathologists who conducted the post-mortem investigations of Sturgess are missing. The first report by Philip Lumb, following his post-mortem and autopsy immediately after Sturgess was declared dead at the hospital on July 8, 2018, was “post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage”, according to the document he signed. This means that Sturgess suffered from a heart attack, which then stopped the flow of oxygen to her brain (hypoxia). Lumb did not report what caused Sturgess’s heart to stop.
More than four months later, on November 29, 2018, a second pathologist, Guy Rutty, signed a report adding Novichok as the cause of Sturgess’s fatal cardiac arrest. Rutty’s addition was kept secret for another two and a half years, revealed only in the Wiltshire coroner’s court between February 28 and March 30, 2020. The cause of Sturgess’s death, which Rutty signed and which was sworn to by the counsel for the coroner, was read out in court: “Ia post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage; Ib Novichok toxicity”.
British forensic toxicologists have observed that the wording of the “Ia/Ib” does not establish the causal link which the coroner at the time, and now Judge Hughes are claiming. “This phraseology is very unusual,” commented an expert source. “They [Rutty and Lumb] seem to have quite deliberately separated the two ‘events’. Far more common to have the words ‘brought about by’ or ‘as a result of’ replacing the 1b term. The implication is that the doctors are separating the events for a reason.”
Rutty and Lumb have repeatedly refused to answer questions, and they have made no comments to the mainstream UK media. In the British Government’s imperative, their testimony is now crucial. Their evidence that Sturgess was killed by Russian Novichok is the foundation of the case – both for the Government, and for the Sturgess family lawyer’s claim for million-pound compensation.
Will Rutty and Lumb be called to testify?
Hughes has published the schedule of his hearings in the third week:
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/
Hughes’s spokesman was asked to confirm if Rutty and Lumb will be called to give evidence on “Medical Cause of Death – Pathology”. The spokesman has refused to say.
