A military convoy arrived at Salisbury district hospital and investigators in hazmat suits were seen at the cemetery where Sergei Skripal’s wife was buried as the investigation into the nerve agent attack on the Russian former spy gathered pace.

More than a dozen vehicles were at the hospital as part of an operation to remove a police car from the site in the aftermath of last Sunday’s attack.

Two military lorries arrived at A&E with police escorts, incident response units and an ambulance. Earlier on Friday it was reported that about 180 military personnel had been called in to assist the investigation into the attempted murder of the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.

The additional personnel were deployed to remove potentially contaminated evidence. Meanwhile, police were seen at the cemetery where the grave of Skripal’s wife, Liudmila, and a memorial to his son, Alexander, who both died in the last few years, lie in adjacent plots that had been cordoned off earlier in the week.

Police placed a blue forensic tent over the memorial to Alexander at Salisbury’s London Road cemetery. Fire officers in hazmat suits were seen pinning down the tent, while other officers in white suits and gas masks were seen packing items from the cemetery into a yellow barrel.

It had previously been reported that Liudmila died of cancer in 2012 aged 59, while Alexander Skripal died in March last year in St Petersburg, aged 43, in unknown circumstances.



The Metropolitan police said reports that a body had been exhumed on Friday were untrue. It is believed that Yulia Skripal may have visited her brother’s memorial stone on his birthday, 1 March – three days before she and her father were taken ill.

As the investigation entered a new phase, the authorities were still seeking to establish exactly where and when a British police officer was poisoned.

DS Nick Bailey is seriously ill in hospital having visited the home of Skripal after the defector and his daughter were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on Sunday afternoon.



Investigators want to know whether Bailey visited the scene where the two Russians were found and was poisoned there or by items there, or whether the officer was contaminated on his visit to Skripal’s home.



Sources say that, while it is not certain, it is believed more likely that Bailey became contaminated on his visit to the home.



Uncertainty about how and where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned led to police requesting military assistance on Friday to secure contaminated evidence. It is understood that personnel from the Royal Marines, the RAF and chemical teams were involved in the operation.

The Met police said the units were called in because they had “the necessary capability and expertise” and urged the public not to be alarmed.



Quick guide Timeline: the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal Show Hide 1.30pm Police have confirmed that Skripal and his daughter were in Salisbury city centre by 1.30pm. It is not known if they walked from his home or whether they drove or were driven in. Between 1.30pm and around 4pm Skripal and his daughter strolled around Salisbury and visited the Zizzi restaurant on Castle Street and the nearby Mill pub. They are believed to have been in Zizzi for about 40 minutes from 2.30pm. 3.47pm A CCTV camera at Snap Fitness in Market Walk captured two people initially thought to be Skripal and his daughter. The woman appeared to be carrying a red handbag. Later it became clear the pair were probably not the Russian and his daughter. Police have been keen to speak to the couple. 4.03pm The same camera caught personal trainer Freya Church. She turned left out of the gym and in front of her saw Skripal and the woman on a bench at the Maltings shopping centre. She said the woman had passed out and the man was behaving strangely. Church walked on. 4.08pm Footage that emerged on Friday from a local business showed that people were still strolling casually through Market Walk. Approx 4.15pm A member of the public dialled 999. The Friday footage shows an emergency vehicle racing through the pedestrianised arcade shortly after 4.15pm. A paramedic also ran through. Police and paramedics worked on the couple at the scene for almost an hour in ordinary uniforms. 5.11pm The woman was airlifted to hospital; Skripal was taken by road. 5.13pm Images taken by a passerby show that officers were still clearly unaware of the severity of the situation. They did not have specialist protective clothing and members of the public also strolled nearby. 5.48pm Police told Salisbury Journal they were investigating a possible drug-related incident. At about this time officers identified Skripal and his daughter and by Sunday evening they were at his home – in normal uniform or street clothes. At some point DS Nick Bailey, now seriously ill in hospital, visited the Skripal house, but it is not known where he was contaminated. Approx 8.20pm Officers donned protective suits to examine the bench and surrounding areas. By 9pm Officers were hosing themselves down. It was not until the next day that a major incident was declared. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP

Sergei, 66, and Yulia, 33, are comatose in hospital after being found unconscious on a bench in the Maltings shopping centre.

The investigation widened on Thursday as police sealed off the memorials to Liudmila and Alexander, and said 21 people had been treated as a result of the incident.

Bailey was described by Kier Pritchard, Wiltshire’s temporary chief constable, as “a massively dedicated officer”. Pritchard said the detective sergeant was “very anxious, very concerned” but sitting up in bed and talking. Amber Rudd, the home secretary, met Bailey during her visit to Salisbury district hospital on Friday.

Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary, said of the request for military assistance: “Our armed forces have stepped up to support the police in their investigation in Salisbury, building on the vital expertise and information already provided by our world-renowned scientists from the defence science and technology laboratory at Porton Down. We have the right people with the right skills to assist with this crucial inquiry. This is a dreadful incident and my thoughts remain with the victims and their families.”



The NHS confirmed that the Skripals were in a critical but stable condition, while Bailey was conscious in a serious but stable condition.

Rudd said: “It is still very serious for the two people subject to this outrageous attack. For the police officer, it is still serious but we understand he is conversing and engaging.

“I understand people’s curiosity about all those questions, wanting to have answers, and there will be a time to have those answers. But the best way to get to them is to make sure we give the police the space they need to really go through the area carefully, to do their investigation and to make sure that they have all the support that they need in order to get that.”

Play Video 2:03 Who is the Salisbury spy Sergei Skripal? – video explainer

She added: “At the moment our priority is going to be the incident, which is why I’m here in Salisbury today, making sure that everybody’s protected around the incident, making sure the emergency services have had the support that they need and will continue to get it. In terms of further options, that will have to wait until we’re absolutely clear what the consequences could be and what the actual source of this nerve agent has been.”

Rudd did not reveal further details about the substance, how it was deployed or who used it.



Ian Blair, who was Metropolitan police commissioner when the former spy Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London, has suggested one line of inquiry is that Skripal may have been exposed to the nerve agent in his own home.

“Clearly what they’re trying to find out at the moment is how was this delivered personally. There obviously are some indications. The officer – I’m very sorry he’s been injured – has actually been to the house, whereas there’s a doctor who looked after the patients in the open who hasn’t been affected at all. There may be some clues floating around in here,” Lord Blair said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Quick guide How hard is it to make a nerve agent? Show Hide Nerve agents are not hard to make in principle, but in practice it takes specialised facilities and training to mix the substances safely. The raw materials themselves are inexpensive and generally not hard to obtain, but the lethality of the agents means they tend to be manufactured in dedicated labs. The main five nerve agents are tabun, which is the easiest to make, sarin, soman, GF and VX. The latter was used to kill Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, at Kuala Lumpur airport last year. VX is particularly stable and can remain on clothing, furniture and the ground for a long time without proper decontamination. All pure nerve agents are colourless organophosphorus liquids which, after they were discovered to be highly poisonous in the 1930s, became the dominant chemical weapons of the second world war. Once made, the substances are easy to disperse, highly toxic, and have rapid effects. Most are absorbed swiftly through the skin or inhaled, but they can also be added to food and drink. The agents take their toll on the body by disrupting electrical signals throughout the nervous system and the effects are fast and dramatic. Victims find it increasingly hard to breathe. Their lungs produce more mucus which can make them cough and foam at the mouth. They sweat, their pupils constrict, and their eyes run. The effects on the digestive system trigger vomiting. Meanwhile the muscles convulse. Many of those affected will wet themselves and lose control of their bowels. At high doses, failure of the nerves and muscles of the respiratory system can kill before other symptoms have time to develop. There are antidotes for nerve agents, such as oxime and atropine, which are particularly effective against VX and sarin, but they should be given soon after exposure to be effective.

Blair said that if the nerve agent was rare, as Rudd has said, then it should be possible to identify where it came from. “If this is rarer than sarin and VX it’s basically possible to identify the laboratory in which it was made. They would be able to establish where it came from – the level of authority is another matter,” he said.

The use of a nerve toxin is seen as a key indicator of possible Kremlin involvement, with such substances usually held only in state military stockpiles.

Moscow has repeatedly denied it had anything to do with the attack, the same line used when Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in his cup of tea. A public inquiry a decade later concluded that the Kremlin had ordered the assassination.