The nerve agent that poisoned two people in Amesbury was contained in a perfume bottle, the brother of one of the victims has claimed.

Matthew Rowley said his brother Charlie, who remains seriously ill in Salisbury hospital, told him that he had picked up the perfume bottle.

The claim will raise the question of whether Dawn Sturgess, who died just over a week after being poisoned by the deadly nerve agent, sprayed the perfume on herself, effectively self-administering a lethal dose of Novichok.

Detectives are urgently working to establish how the perfume bottle came to be in the flat, and whether the Novichok it contains comes from the same batch used in the attack on the former Russian agent and his daughter, Yulia on March 4.

One theory is that Mr Rowley, 45, and Ms Sturgess, 44, had been contaminated when they picked up the container after finding it hidden under a bush in a park in the centre of Salisbury on the afternoon of Friday 30 June.