How police worked backwards to find 'ground zero' of the Salisbury Novichok poisonings

A senior Metropolitan Police officer has described the frantic search to find "ground zero" - the place where former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent.

"It was a very sobering moment to realise that there was a chemical warfare agent present in Salisbury," Commander Dominic Murphy told an inquiry on Tuesday.

"We were putting police officers in scenes that were contaminated with one of the most dangerous substances on the planet."

The Skripals became seriously ill as they sat on a bench in Salisbury city centre on March 4, 2018. They survived, but Dawn Sturgess, who was poisoned with the same nerve agent four months later, did not.

She fell ill after inadvertently spraying Novichok onto her wrist from a perfume bottle that had been found by her partner Charlie Rowley.

Speaking at the inquiry into Sturgess’ death, Murphy, the head of the Met’s counter terror command, said that the Skripals' poisoning was "truly an unprecedented incident of a scale that we had not seen".

He described how hundreds of officers worked "backwards" to trace the Skripals' movements on the day they were poisoned.

Their hunt took them from the park bench where the Skripals collapsed to a nearby Zizzi restaurant. Samples of Novichok were found both there and in the pub they’d visited for a drink beforehand.

After searching the Sainsbury’s car park where the pair had left their car, Murphy told the inquiry officers spent a "considerable amount of effort" trying to trace the exact coin that Sergei had used in the parking meter, to no avail.

By the end of that week, tests on the Skripals’ car had revealed high levels of Novichok on the driver’s door handle, and Murphy said he began to work on the basis that this was "ground zero".

He told the inquiry he regretted that he and his colleagues had used the term "ground zero", because of its association with the 9/11 terror attacks. But he said the nickname had "stuck".

They also searched the Skripals' home, where traces of Novichok were found throughout, possibly as a result of cross contamination from police searches.

Inside, they found a number of pets belonging to Sergei, including his cat.

Murphy told the inquiry: "Every time we were in the premises, we were trying to care for the animals, but the cat was particularly stressed by out by our presence".

He said officers took the decision to have the cat euthanised "for its welfare" and because it was "likely to have been contaminated". He said the Skripals’ pet guinea pigs also died of natural causes inside the property.

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It wasn’t until nearly two weeks after the attack that investigators finally tested the front door handle of the Skripals’ home, by which time officers had been coming and going for days.

Even at that time, said Commander Murphy, the levels of Novichok found on the door handle were "still so sufficiently high that the immediate hypothesis was that this was ground zero".

The UK government has blamed Russia for the attack.

Murphy was asked why the door handle had not been tested earlier, in light of information about Russia’s experiments with applying chemical weapons to door handles.

He replied: "The investigation did not know about that. We were following the evidence trail".

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