Original subtitles

[Reporter] The BBC understands that a former Russian spy

is in a critical condition in hospital in wiltshire.

They were severely critically ill, developing multi-organ failure.

It's such a crazy kinda story, it's almost unbelievable.

[Man] I knew it was novichok, a military-grade nerve agent.

Even tiny amounts can kill tens of thousands of people.

[Sirens wailing]

This is being treated as a major incident involving attempted murder

via a nerve agent.

She was staring at nothing

and foaming at the mouth.

The first time in a century

a chemical weapon had been used in Western Europe.

"It's only a matter of time before I slip into a coma and die."

[Theresa may] It is now clear Mr. Skripal and his daughter

were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent

of the type developed by Russia.

There was absolutely no doubt that this is an operation

controlled by Vladimir putin

through Russian military intelligence.

The intent is to kill people.

I've been caught up in an international assassination attempt.

The substance could potentially be anywhere in the city.

It was as though a bomb had gone off on the streets of Salisbury.

Ordinary people caught in absolutely extraordinary circumstances.

He's like, "I've literally poisoned my girlfriend."

You know?

"Unknowingly, I've killed me girlfriend."

[Man] People would come from far and wide to Salisbury to visit.

It's always had a very nice kind of feel and atmosphere.

Such a small city.

I was just a normal guy,

a normal police officer doing his job

before march the 4th, 2018 happened.

And it changed my life forever.

My name is Nick Bailey.

I was a detective sergeant

in the criminal investigation department in Salisbury.

I was at my desk in bourne hill police station.

I just remember hearing a call on the radio

about two people that were found

in the maltings, in the city.

It's a stone's throw, effectively, from the cathedral.

They were unconscious and slumped on a park bench,

heavily salivating.

[Woman] The air ambulance had been spotted

over Salisbury city center.

And as I was heading home that way,

I said I would go and investigate it.

My name is Rebecca Hudson

and I was a trainee reporter at the Salisbury journal.

There was a police cordon.

They said that it was a couple who had suffered some sort of drug-related incident

and been taken to hospital as a result.

We didn't know anything about what condition they were in.

But to have that police cordon seemed bizarre at the time,

and it sparked a lot of curiosity, I think.

On the bench over there

there was a man being sick on the floor, leant over,

and a woman lying on the floor.

She was sort of leant in on him,

it looked like she'd passed out maybe.

He was doing some strange hand movements,

looking up to the sky.

Nobody knew what was going on, we didn't know what had happened,

we didn't know if a crime had taken place.

Maybe they'd been contaminated or poisoned with something.

It could have been a drugs overdose.

Didn't really know why they were that ill.

One of the police officers said, "you might want to stay

because something interesting is going to happen."

And when the fire crews arrived,

a couple of them immediately

started to put their chemical Hazmat suits on.

It looked like they were swabbing the bench.

And then we realized they were cleaning something up,

someone at the scene had said it was vomit,

and began a fairly lengthy process of bagging

and double-bagging and triple-bagging this vomit up,

and then put it inside a metal container.

I just didn't know why they were taking so many precautions.

There was no explanation at the time.

My uniformed colleagues had found a driver's license,

and on the driver's license it said the name Sergei skripal

and gave a local Salisbury address.

One of my team googled Sergei skripal's name.

I remember vividly him saying, "sarge, you're gonna need to come and see this."

And I walked over and looked over his shoulder at the computer,

and it was a picture of Sergei skripal,

and it was a newspaper headline.

And it basically said that he was a former Russian spy

who'd been released as part of some kind of international spy swap.

That information changed everything.

He was deemed to be a traitor to Russia.

The biggest spy swap since the cold war.

[Reporter 1] Two planes, one from america and one from Russia,

met on the tarmac.

[Reporter 2] The four men who were released from Russian prisons

had all been convicted of handling highly classified information.

[Speaking Russian]

[Speaking Russian]

[Dramatic music]

[Nick] Sergei skripal was not just a Russian spy,

but a former double agent working for MI6.

He chose Salisbury, or MI6 chose Salisbury for him.

It is amazing that he'd gone from being behind bars in Russia

to suddenly being here, in little old Salisbury.

[Man] That is the first time that I become aware

that we've got a Russian spy who was actually living in Salisbury.

I'm Paul mills, I'm the deputy chief constable of wiltshire police.

The Salisbury poisonings, without doubt,

was the most complex, challenging policing incident I've ever been involved in.

[Man over radio] Approaching christie Miller road.

[Mills] After the incident on the Sunday,

we've got three officers that we decide will go into Mr. Skripal's home address

to look to see whether there's any information or clues

which would indicate actually how they'd become ill.

[Man over radio] They've obtained key from the neighbor.

[Rebecca] As a girl in her early 20s in Salisbury at the time,

I never in my wildest dreams

thought I would be writing headlines

that were referencing a spy living in Salisbury.

To find out that there was a spy living in christie Miller road,

which was a road I'd walked past

on my way to and from school even,

was bizarre, I couldn't make any sense of it.

We had to borrow suits from the fire station,

latex gloves, goggles and masks, like, kind of breathing masks.

We had to protect the scene from us.

We got kitted up on the driveway of the house.

So I unlocked the front door

and undid the handle and walked into Sergei skripal's house.

I did think,

"why is a former Russian spy living in Salisbury?

And how did we not know that he was there?"

Surely we should have been made aware.

By all accounts, no one knew.

There was nothing obvious in the house

that would give us any more of an idea

as to why they were in critical condition in hospital.

I went home after a 15-16 hour shift.

I think I left the police station at about half six in the morning.

And I remember feeling a bit kind of sweaty,

my forehead was sweaty,

which I put down to just kind of...

[Chuckles bitterly] Stress and exhaustion.

And I remember, as well,

my pupils were quite small.

But I didn't think anything more of it.

[Radio] A man and a woman

are in hospital after an incident in the maltings

in Salisbury yesterday afternoon.

Firefighters were also called to assist with a hazardous material.

[Man] Salisbury's fairly sleepy.

Who would have thought someone had a spy living next door.

My name is James haslam,

I'm a consultant in anesthesia

and intensive care medicine here in Salisbury.

I remember coming into work on the Monday morning,

was about to take over the icu for the week.

I'd heard that there'd been two patients admitted the previous afternoon.

There was an older gentleman and a younger lady.

They were getting sicker and sicker.

[Woman] In terms of the symptoms,

in the first 24-48 hours,

it was a bit of a mystery

why they were with us in hospital.

Whether that was an overdose,

whether it was an accidental poisoning,

what had caused this?

They were critically ill,

they were requiring full life support.

[Dr. Haslam] In the handover, the working diagnosis was opioid poisoning or toxicity.

And I just, in my gut, I felt like that wasn't quite right.

They were severely, critically ill,

developing multi-organ failure.

I thought, at that stage, it was likely to have been an assassination attempt.

And then your mind starts spiraling as to what that means.

I spent most of the night on the Internet, researching.

[Man] I got a phone call from a doctor saying,

"there has been an incident in Salisbury, it's really bizarre.

We think it might be some sort of chemical incident.

We're really unsure what it is, so stand by.

We might need some advice."

My name is Hamish De bretton-Gordon,

I commanded the cbrn regiment,

chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear,

for the UK and for NATO.

When I saw the first pictures

of Sergei skripal on the bench,

almost frozen,

it looked like this is probably a nerve agent.

And that's when the alarm bells started ringing.

[Heart monitors beeping]

[Dr. Haslam] There was a real sense of threat from this substance,

which we didn't know much about.

What we had to do was kind of formulate a recipe

of drugs that would keep them alive

and hopefully give them time to get better.

I was concerned about these patients,

I was worried that they were gonna die.

I was stunned.

I mean, I'd dealt with biological weapons attacks by al-qaeda,

in both Iraq and Afghanistan,

I had personally experienced a chemical attack in Syria.

One of the shocking things was, you know,

this is right on our doorstep,

my family were in Salisbury at the time.

I rang my wife,

"guys, you need to be careful.

You're gonna hear pretty soon,

this is gonna go stratospheric in the media,

there's a chemical attack in Salisbury,

there's something pretty horrendous out there,

we don't know what it is.

I'd suggest you stay out of the place."

[Rebecca] The motto for thesalisbury journal

was "the heartbeat of your community."

You're just covering the small, often fun stories that people love to read

but that don't hold a huge deal of news value.

A cow that gave birth to triplets,

a cat that was stuck under the bonnet of a car.

This is the picture that our photographer took at the scene,

which then was used all throughout the world.

Given the level of secrecy,

I was very proud that we got this picture

because there was nobody else there

who was documenting what had happened.

That picture was the beginning

of Salisbury being known for an international nerve agent attack

on a Russian double agent.

The biggest story that I would ever cover,

and I think that Salisbury would ever see.

[Nick] That Monday morning I wasn't due to work.

Three o'clock in the afternoon

I was woken by a phone call from work

asking me some questions about the events of the night before.

I was a little bit anxious about how I was feeling.

I just didn't feel good at all.

The start of a migraine... I don't know.

And at that point, I just put it down to, I must be... just exhaustion.

My wife and two girls were at home

and I said, "why I've been at work for so long?

Because we're dealing with something that is potentially quite big,

but we don't know a lot yet,

but it's very strange, it's very quite sinister."

The BBC understands that a former Russian spy

is in a critical condition

in hospital in wiltshire

along with a woman in her thirties.

A major incident was declared

and decontamination teams were called

into the local hospital and part of the city.

[Woman] "Is this some kind of toxic poisoning?

How many people could potentially be at risk of harm?"

To me was the thing that was keeping me awake at night.

My name is Tracy daszkiewicz.

I was director of public health for the wiltshire council

during the time of the Salisbury poisonings.

"Was it an assassination attempt?"

Those sorts of questions start to emerge.

That's a really horrible feeling,

that something like that can happen in peace time

in a place like Salisbury.

The information that was disclosed,

I wasn't able to share that with anybody.

A nerve agent is a chemical weapon

developed by the Nazis.

One molecule of this stuff is enough to kill you.

The challenge then is to work out where it could be.

[Tracy] The imagination then breeds fear and anxiety.

In those early days,

it could've easily been full scale of fatalities and casualties.

[Rebecca] At thejournal, we had heard a rumor

that there was runoff from the nerve agent

in the river avon.

And that that was flowing through the city

and that that had come about when the fire service

hosed down the bench the skripals were found on.

Ducks and swans in the city were being poisoned or were dying.

We couldn't rule any of these rumors out.

This substance could potentially be anywhere in the city

and that anyone could have come into contact with it.

[Tracy] For the community living in Salisbury,

it was frightening, unusual, very scary.

It's quite daunting really, and it's just quite worrying

to know what's gonna happen next.

Because the fact there's a Russian spy living right next door

and we never knew about it.

And then for something like this to happen,

it's quite concerning.

People are nervous about it

because it's so close to home.

It's the not knowing and what's going on, really.

I mean, there's a lot of security around and a lot of police around.

So, yeah.

Within the space of less than 24 hours, it was clear

it was clear that there was a major incident evolving here.

The world's press descended upon Salisbury.

[Woman] It was becoming crazy.

The city streets themselves are part of the news.

My name is Olga ivshina,

I'm a senior reporter for BBC Russian service.

I was on the phone talking Russian.

Just saw that there is an old lady staring at me

and sort of waiting for me to finish the call.

I put down the phone and she said,

"oh, it's you Russians! What have you done to our city?

What have you done? Why do you do this to us?"

It was a moment which told you the story, in a way.

How frightened and angry people are.

There you are in Salisbury,

but give us your perspective

as a journalist for the BBC Russian service, about how this...

[Olga] I was the only Russian speaker which worked on that news.

And they said, "listen, your job is very important.

To learn more about Sergei skripal,

about his family, about his past in Russia."

We know that there was someone with Sergei,

some other woman who was sitting next to him

and who's also in the hospital at the moment

in a very bad condition.

But that's it, we didn't know anything else.

During these days, BBC spoke to a number of experts,

and all say that we should be cautious...

And certainly we shouldn't issue any accusations at the moment.

Some day, at like six A.M. London time,

I got a message saying,

"yes, I am a niece of Sergei skripal, call me."

[Speaking Russian]

You could hear her voice trembling.

And then she said,

"what's going on, is she alive?"

And then I had to tell her that she's in the hospital in critical condition.

[Dr. Haslam] By this stage, on the Tuesday,

the patients were close to death.

We had armed guards at the end of our icu.

Is anybody gonna come back and try and finish our patients off?

And could we get caught in any crossfire?

That was certainly something that we worried about.

[Machines beeping]

[Olga] When viktoria skripal said,

"what have they done to him?"

I asked her, "who do you mean?"

And she said, "security services, Russian security services."

That was her initial reaction.

[Nick] Tuesday night, that's when things started to change for me.

They were like nightmares or hallucinations.

Like, pure hate and flames right in front of my eyes.

As if you were able to get close enough to the surface of the sun,

it was like a Tsunami of pure hate and fire.

That was terrifying, but when I woke up I was boiling hot

and I was literally pouring with sweat,

just pouring with sweat.

And I got out of bed and I staggered downstairs

'cause I needed to get a drink of water,

and I felt really, really unsteady on my feet.

And my vision was impaired,

it was like still frames that were jittering from one to the next,

that's how my eyesight was,

and it was horrible.

I looked at the mirror again and my pupils were still tiny,

and I was scared, physically, by how I was feeling.

It was terrifying,

so I went to hospital, to a&E.

That's the first time I met James.

[Dr. Haslam] I went down to examine him

and, by this stage,

I know what nerve agent poisoning looks like,

although nothing had been officially confirmed.

But there were lots of conversations behind closed doors.

[Hamish] I've seen how these things kill people.

So, when your body starts shutting down,

the initial look is statuesque,

where people are frozen

because their muscles can't move.

There will be choking because you can't breathe,

you get pin-pointed pupils

because your eyes are shutting down.

[Dr. Haslam] I had to break the news to him

that there was a class of nerve agents called "novichok,"

something that is extremely terrifying.

It was designed to kill

on a mass scale.

And then there is the horror, the fear factor,

of being poisoned.

[Nick] James came in and said,

"you have a nerve agent called novichok in your system."

We were in completely unknown territory now.

I'd been caught up in an international assassination attempt.

Even the staff of the hospital were scared

about how this was gonna work

and what was going on.

And I... yeah, it's pure terror.

I cried a lot

'cause I was so scared.

I thought it's only a matter of time

before I slip into a coma and die.

[Machines beeping]

[Dr. Haslam] I felt under a lot of pressure.

I was really worried about my three patients.

The ramifications were starting to play out in my mind.

This is going to be some sort of international scandal

if one of them died.

That could be the start of war.

[Woman] It was outrageous that two people living in Salisbury

had been attacked in this way.

It was as though a bomb had gone off on the streets of Salisbury.

This was almost an act of war.

As a cabinet minister and as a home secretary,

you feel the affrontery, really, of the violence

of this act on British soil.

And so we attributed it as a terrorist attack.

Until we could actually pinpoint it as attributed

to an individual leading a nation-state.

[Camera shutters clicking]

[Man shouts] Are you ready to retaliate, prime minister?

How will you hit back?

[Amber rudd] But Theresa may was determined that we shouldn't rush it

in order to have a proper response.

[Man] It's hard to imagine a situation where the stakes could be higher.

"International terrorist operations"

fundamentally goes to the defense of the realm

and the security of the country.

My name is Mark rowley.

When the Salisbury poisonings happened,

I was the head of UK counter terrorism policing,

leading that national responsibility from Scotland yard.

[Rowley] It is being treated as a major incident

involving attempted murder

by administration of a nerve agent

finding the weapon, finding the suspects

was a massively high priority.

The challenge was we didn't know how it'd been brought in,

and who'd brought it in.

So many unknowns.

[Paul mills] What's really, really critical

is to catch those who have done it.

It was tense, but we had a job to do.

The counter-terrorism police

had to firstly establish where the skripals had actually been poisoned

and ultimately, by who.

Clearly at the center of that was cctv.

Piecing all of that together and then tracing that back to Russia

was one of the most complex investigations I would say in recent policing history.

[Mark rowley] We've got the police forensic experts on the ground,

armed specialist protection officers

protecting the skripals at the hospital.

The lead intelligence agencies, mi5 and MI6,

it's like bringing an orchestra together

from scratch at high speed.

One of the key things about novichok

that the Russians designed into it,

that it was undetectable.

And after they were first infected with nerve agent,

they were spreading contamination.

It's a bit like your DNA,

you leave it whatever you touch.

So one had to find the source

and then track where the skripals had been.

Trying to trace all the novichok was a absolute nightmare.

You're looking for the smallest smears of a liquid

across a whole city.

But the forensic examination

is far harder, far slower

than the normal forensic examination.

It's a long, slow process

requiring immense care.

Being a reporter, you know,

you have to be close.

You can't see it, but it might be there

and it might be really, really dangerous.

[Paul mills] We had to sample every blade of grass,

take it to a mass spectrometer

and work out whether there was novichok there.

The threat was massive.

[Mark] Due to the nature of novichok,

this stuff lives for a very, very long time, it doesn't degrade.

All of those people that actually responded,

whether or not that was police officers,

ambulance staff, the hospital, other members of the public,

that had actually come into contact with the skripals,

the potential for chronic illness

meant we had to destroy 18 police vehicles, nine ambulances...

We start to lock down all of the scenes.

It was huge.

[Hamish] We buried 37 vehicles.

So little of it can be fatal

that you have to track every molecule,

but we're talking about millions and millions of molecules.

[Paul] Early on, every option has to be on the table

if it's gonna help save lives.

A mass evacuation of large areas of Salisbury

to protect the public

was a possibility.

[Man] A chemical weapon hadn't been used in Western Europe

since world war I.

And it was clearly and unlawful use

of a very reckless form of force

against the UK and against a British citizen.

Novichok was a new nerve agent

developed in the late years of the Soviet union

in the 1980s.

As soon as it became clear that the nerve agent was a novichok,

we knew that only Russia possessed that kind of capability.

Me, as the national security advisor advising the prime minister,

I was always clear that the Russians were the prime suspect.

[Speaking Russian]

[Hamish] The Russians were trying to put across

that this novichok had not originated in Russia,

creating the view that the brits were responsible for it,

you know, they'd done it to themselves.

Near everybody had done it, except the Russians.

Yet every news channel was full of this stuff.

Information warfare, disinformation, or propaganda,

it is part of the Russian armory.

[Man] Why don't you ask yourselves the question,

"how can the British authorities so quickly

manage to designate the nerve agent used

as something called novichok?

It has a chemical signature that they were able to...

But when you have a nerve agent or whatever,

you check it against certain samples that you retain in your laboratory.

[Man] The defence science and technology laboratory

at porton down, just near Salisbury

I've worked with most of my military career.

They are the world's experts

in chemical and biological type warfare.

Porton down is the largest military facility

in the United Kingdom

that has been dealing with chemical weapons research.

And it's actually only eight miles from Salisbury.

I've lived in Salisbury my whole life,

but I couldn't tell you a great deal about

what actually goes on inside porton down.

Porton down does have a reputation for being quite mysterious,

and for having strange conspiracies and stories that surround it.

They're investigating aliens, they're talking about mass poisonings,

they're doing all sorts of experiments to do with animal testing.

Porton down, I am sure,

has the files and details of what novichok is and how to make it.

We certainly have the formulas

and that was from people who'd defected from Russia

back in the 70s and 80s.

But the fact that a level four biosecure laboratory

where the most deadly pathogens are stored

and worked on is in Salisbury

is just a quirk of fate.

[Olga] For the Russians, in spy stories,

there is never any coincidence.

You're not suggesting that porton down is responsible for this nerve agent?

I don't know. I don't know...

I don't have an evidence of anything be... having been used.

I was following the Russian take on the story quite closely.

The Salisbury journal website was flooded

with hundreds of comments that were from Russia.

[Lord Mark sedwill] Through various means

they put out dozens and dozens of different stories,

some of them completely implausible,

just simply in order to confuse people.

[Speaking Russian]

People believed the conspiracy narrative.

I think in that first week after the attack we lost the information war.

[Crowd jeering]

It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter

were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent known as novichok.

Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent

by world leading experts at the defense, science and technology laboratory

at porton down, the government has concluded that it is highly likely

that Russia was responsible.

[Russian anthem plays]

[Lord sedwill] The willingness to use chemical weapons, targeted assassination,

operations of the kind we saw against the skripals,

it's inconceivable that a program of that kind would have been conducted

without the approval of president putin.

[Russian anthem continues]

[Woman] Are you strong enough to take on putin, prime minister?

[Theresa may] Mr. Speaker, this was not just an act of attempted murder

in Salisbury, it is an affront to the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.

The United Kingdom will now expel 23 Russian diplomats

- [audience murmurs] - Who have been identified

as undeclared intelligence officers.

Nerve agents are a weapon of mass destruction.

Having been chucked in the deep end,

and I had to learn on the job how these evil toxic substances work.

You know, that's why I didn't sleep much that first week

because every sinew was straining for that.

Given it was such an evil act we felt like we wanted to beat it.

[Nick Bailey] My room in intensive care became my world.

The doctors and the nurses, the consultants would come in to see me

in completely, like, full suits, masks, visors,

double, triple gloves.

You know, they have to protect themselves,

but that kind of fueled my fear of the unknown.

It fueled my terror. I've got no idea how this is gonna play out.

I thought that I was gonna be locked up in a mental institute.

[Amber rudd] Very dramatic, it felt to me, visiting the hospital.

I was taken up to see detective sergeant Nick Bailey.

I've never seen so many wires going into a man's body.

It was a shock just to see him in that state.

I was conscious throughout my time in hospital,

whereas Sergei and yulia weren't.

They were worse because they had, probably,

had a stronger hit of it than I did,

and as such I didn't fall unconscious

or wasn't needed to put into a coma.

[Rudd] The consultant who was in charge

was on the verge of tears as I spoke to him.

[Machines beeping]

I went into intensive care as a profession,

partly because my dad was critically ill when I was a kid.

And...

The icu guys saved his life.

And so, [voice shaking] Yeah, that's what I wanted to do for my patients

was to save their lives.

- [Siren wailing] - [Rudd] I realized that Nick Bailey was going to live

because the consultant slept hardly at all in days,

trying to keep his patients alive and he was winning.

There were so, so many people, doctors, nurses, consultants

that were involved in looking after me.

Undoubtedly, they saved my life.

James haslam was one of those people

and he's got a tiny little place in my heart

because he's part of that horrific ordeal in hospital,

and I'm incredibly grateful.

At heart, I'm an emotional englishman and I...

[Scoffs] Emotions are just below the surface for me.

I've looked after all kinds of dying, sick patients and...

I think every patient who survives is...

Wonderful, and that's why we do the job.

I do care deeply about patients.

With all the press around, we had to sneak Nick out

of the backdoor of the hospital.

[Woman] Sergeant Nick Bailey's condition has now improved, and he was discharged

from Salisbury district hospital this afternoon.

I personally want to wish Nick and his family well,

and I know that the staff right across the hospital

will want me to share their very best wishes.

I also want to update you on the condition of Sergei skripal.

He's responding well to treatment, improving rapidly,

and is no longer in a critical condition.

[Dr. Haslam] My sickest patients, two Russian nationals,

had dramatically turned a corner

and had stabilized physiologically, which was a huge relief.

[Machines beeping]

[Lorna wilkinson] And, as the skripals started to wake up,

they both made quick strides in their recovery.

It actually was then shorter than we expected

from that time to them actually gaining consciousness,

being awake, being able to converse with us.

But, obviously, very quickly the police got involved.

This was part of a major investigation.

This had so much complexity to it. It had the political angle,

it had the world of espionage,

and took us to the edge of a world

that most of us don't even know exists.

We think it's the stuff ofjames bond films.

The Russians like using exotic methods

to take out people who they don't approve of.

You know, the stabbing, the spraying or whatever.

You know, litvinenko, polonium-210, a drop being put in his tea.

You let mother Russia down and mother Russia will take you down.

[Speaking Russian]

A case like this is enormously complex, and just one strand of that

was Sergei and yulia skripal's movements

on the day the poisons took a hold on them.

In terms of the investigation tracking down ground zero,

where was novichok administered?

The cctv was giving us the picture of

the movement of the skripals during that day.

[Ebru ozturk] Mr. Skripal was one of my favorite customers.

He made me always smile.

He's very kind, very happy, cheerful, never rush.

He's very slow, calm, you know, the...

And he use, "no problem."

He's always used this, "no problem."

This phrases always remind me of him.

He's like a proper, proper grandfather, you know?

Last time Mr. Skripal came to my shop,

he mentioned the daughter is coming to see him

and they're going to spend time together

which make him very happy.

You know, he was excited.

That was the last time I saw him.

Yulia has recently arrived from Russia,

looking forward to a holiday with her dad.

We know that one of the first things she did when she got to the UK

was go and visit her mom's grave, which they had done together.

We know they've been into a pub.

[Paul mills] We know they've then been to a restaurant

and then they've become unwell.

And we've got nine different scenes

that are up and running in Salisbury.

We learned more and more, and what was very clear

that everybody that had become ill

had been directly in contact with the front door of Sergei's house.

[Nick] A couple of weeks after leaving hospital

I was shocked to learn that it was on the door handle.

I was the first person through the door

after they had become poisoned,

and so it got onto my glove, and somehow got onto my skin, and into my blood system.

[Tracy daszkiewicz] That door was removed, and at that point we then knew

that the science that we'd use to track his movements

had been the right approach.

[Nick] Such a brazen attempt on someone's life,

and anybody could have touched that door handle.

It angered me.

Novichok, without a doubt, is a killer.

Let's be clear, it's a military-grade chemical weapon.

Those that came to target Mr. Skripal and yulia

were intending to kill them.

[Speaking Russian]

[Rebecca Hudson] Russian disinformation was intensifying.

There were dozens of wild theories about what I had done

or what I hadn't done.

I was accused of having burner phones buried in my back garden

that I would dig up at night to contact all sorts of people to help plan these attacks.

[Nick] At one point, I was accused of being the assassin.

I was accused of being Sergei's handler.

I was accused of working for MI6.

The most ridiculous of those, I think, was that I had stolen the skripal's cat.

Obviously, none of this true.

One of the lines that was coming out in Russian reporting

was that Sergei and yulia skripal were being, almost,

held against their will in the hospital

and not being allowed to talk to relatives or see relatives.

We want to see the evidence.

We want to have access to Russian nationals.

We are denied.

And we want to make our own investigation,

and we want to understand what happened there.

The Russians suggested that the skripals had been

abducted by UK authorities in some form,

which, obviously, was completely ridiculous

but it was part of their disinformation campaign.

[Speaking Russian]

There were people even within the city, a minority,

but who started to question, "is this real? This hadn't happened.

These patients weren't here. Sergei didn't survive. He couldn't have survived.

This was all fake."

He absolutely did survive, the same as yulia survived

so yeah, they're wrong.

[Speaking Russian]

[Speaking Russian]

[Lorna] Yulia had survived.

We hadn't thought anybody would survive novichok poisoning.

I think that, collectively,

there was almost a sadness at saying goodbye to her

because she was also saying goodbye to somebody

who you knew would get swallowed up into a secret world.

We all knew that her life would be changed forever.

It was Sergei's choice to be a professional spy and he answers for that.

But then, suddenly, you know, it affects other people who never signed up for that.

Did his daughter sign up for that? No, she didn't.

[Speaking Russian]

[Duncan Murray] Sergei had been really sick.

In extraordinary circumstances someone had tried to kill him.

My name's Duncan Murray,

and I'm a consultant anesthetist and intensive care specialist.

I happened to be the attending consultant

at the time that he was able to breathe unassisted.

He didn't die when he was in Salisbury hospital.

I don't know what's happened beyond that, but, yeah.

The last time I saw him [Laughing] he was alive,

and I've got no reason to believe that

he didn't leave the hospital alive.

Yeah.

[Dr. Haslam] On discharging our last patient

there was a real sense of relief, of accomplishment.

Things started to return to normal.

All the fanfare of the press and everything had gone.

- [Bells chiming] - In the back of our minds

there was a sense that the police hadn't found the novichok,

and so there was a niggling feeling.

Could it still be out there? Do we need to be worried?

When a story involves spies and exiles,

the public will want to know, "well, what really went on? What's under the surface?"

In terms of the investigation,

we're very interested in finding the team behind this, the suspects.

[Paul] Slowly but surely, the counterterrorism police were able to narrow down

with the cctv imaging, and then have that Eureka moment.

We're able to see our two suspects arriving at the train station.

Well, if they're only in Salisbury for a short period of time,

and then we'd know that they go back to London after the attack,

and certainly by early evening they're on a flight back to Russia.

Counterterrorism police needed to identify those two suspects.

[Sir Mark rowley] It was quite possible that the offenders

may have taken the exact novichok agent,

that was used to attempt to kill Sergei skripal, with them.

They may have destroyed it in a completely different part of the country,

but it stayed high on our list of priorities

because public safety was the number one issue.

[Paul] It's back to the needle in the haystack.

The novichok getting where that was

is still a major, major question Mark for us.

We had gone through everything in terms of checking and checking again.

I felt Salisbury was safe. I wasn't in any doubt.

[Radio reporter] First of all,

spire fm news at three o'clock.

[Radio reporter 2] Prince Charles and the duchess of cornwall

have visited Salisbury to help drum up trade after the nerve agent attack.

[Rebecca] By June, we were just returning to normality

and not writing about Russians or nerve agents in every paper.

The big story at the Salisbury journal at the time

was people coming from all over the country, or from all over the world,

to celebrate the summer solstice at stonehenge.

- Not many cities have a druid community. - [Man] Diva.

-[All] Diva. -[Man] ♪ diva, diva ♪

The stonehenge solstice that happens in June every year

is our biggest policing operation.

Over 10,000 people. You're there as the sun comes up

and it's a wonderful place to be.

[Arthur pendragon] And if you grew up around here,

Salisbury and stonehenge are part and parcel of the same thing

and it's in your DNA.

Solstice 2018,

this was the first ceremony we'd had here after the poisoning.

We said some prayers for all those affected.

This is rural wiltshire. Everybody knows everybody.

Salisbury is a small community and we jokingly refer to it as smallsbury,

so everybody knew someone who was touched by it.

[Rebecca] We had been told repeatedly that Salisbury was safe

and that the nerve agent areas had all been identified.

And then... [sighs]

We had heard that there had been

an unexplained incident.

There were a lot of parallels with what had happened back in march.

[Reporter] A major incident's been declared in amesbury,

where police think a man and a woman left critically ill

may have been exposed to an unknown substance.

[Rebecca] I didn't recognize Charlie rowley,

but Charlie had been arrested a few times

and the journal had reported on that.

[Charlie] I found a novichok bottle a week after my girlfriend,

dawn, done the summer solstice.

Dawn, basically, grew up in the closest village to stonehenge.

My name is Charlie rowley. I went through a state of homelessness.

But it, you know, and it got better.

You know, and I got me own place. It was like a dream come true.

I had a lovely, lovely girlfriend, dawn.

And the whole thing of getting a new flat was overwhelming.

You know, it blew me socks off.

I knew that there was gonna be sunshine at the end of the cloud.

[Reporter] The pair in their forties were found unconscious

at a property in muggleton road on Saturday evening.

Charlie got a brand new flat and he invited dawn to come and live with him.

And the pair of 'em were like, "wow, it's the perfect family home.

It's a brand new fresh start."

A dream home for the pair of them.

And so, they set about building their little love nest up together.

[Charlie] I furnished my flat with stuff that had been thrown away,

and my past time was going around various charity shop bins

and get electrical equipment, or kitchenware and stuff.

Just digging in deep, really.

You could find, like, all sorts of things, like gold necklaces,

to silver, to earings and all sorts.

And it would all be proper and gold.

And I would have treasures to take back to dawn.

She would look forward to seeing me the next day

to see what I'd pull out of my sack.

One person's rubbish is another man's gold as they say.

[Charlie] But I remember going to the bin and going through it,

and I found a perfume box for dawn.

I thought, "hey, winner, winner."

And it was all in plastic, all sealed, and it looked expensive.

So I put it in me pocket.

He loves little treasures that he finds, but then,

obviously, he come across this bottle

which he thought was a good treasure,

a bottle of perfume.

He ended up doing something the police didn't achieve

by finding the novichok bottle.

I mean, we think there was about a a quarter,

an eighth of a cup of novichok.

If you administered that correctly

it could have killed tens of thousands of people.

This wasn't a standard Nina ricci bottle.

This had been manufactured so that the applicator was key.

Finding the perfume bottle was the most important piece of the puzzle.

[Charlie] It was Saturday, the 30th of June.

I gave the bottle of perfume to my girlfriend, dawn.

She said, "oh, that's a good one. That's a good make."

And I thought I'd done well then, you know?

So, it was in a cardboard box in a heat sealed kind of package.

It was, like, molded to the bottle

so I had to use a sharp kitchen knife to cut it open.

I then put the top nozzle on to the glass bottle

and covered me hands in the spray.

I washed it off and then gave it to dawn.

And she was quite happy and sprayed it on herself.

She had one squirt on her wrists, like that, and rubbed them together.

Yeah, one squirt on the wrists and rubbed them.

I carry a hell of a lot of guilt

because I gave that... Novichok to my girlfriend.

I knew that she cared for me and stuff,

and she said that she wanted a sapphire ring for an engagement ring,

but she would quite happily settle for a haribo ring,

and that said it all, really.

Yeah.

I went into the bathroom and she was in a bad way.

Like, staring at nothing and foaming at the mouth. So I called her name.

Um...

I shook her and then realized that I had got no response.

Dawn had given up breathing for herself.

[Siren wailing]

I seen an ambulance outside Charlie's house, and then I see getting dawn

taken out on a stretcher, and...

Yeah, it wasn't a nice sight. She didn't look very well at all there,

and it was quite upsetting to see that.

[Sam Hobson] We'd gone back to the flat and Charlie was in bits,

like, emotional wreck, crying,

and then, suddenly, he started acting all weird and paranoid.

And then he just started to try to attack me.

I had him by the neck.

I was trying to strangle him because I thought he'd kill me, try to kill me,

and I thought he'd done the same to dawn.

I said, "Charlie, what are you doing?

I'm your friend and I'm not going to leave you,

even though you're attacking me.

I'm gonna stay with you because it's the right thing to do,

because this isn't you."

But that's when he started showing symptoms of frothing at the mouth,

sweating loads, and his eyes going glazed and red and milky colored.

[Charlie] Oh, well, it's just like something out of a horror movie kind of,

or a zombie film.

I was acting really weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then he started rocking backwards and forwards

and muttering some weird tongue language.

I don't know what it was but I couldn't get any sense out of him at all.

So, that's when I thought there's something definitely wrong here.

So I had to call 999.

[Charlie] He'd done the right thing.[Chuckles]

He'd done the right thing 'cause I'd be dead now.

[Ambulance wailing]

[Dr. Haslam] The first I heard about it,

one of my colleagues had admitted two patients in sequence

who had unusual... An unusual presentation.

And again, alarm bells were ringing.

Could this be similar to before?

It can't be, can it?

As we confirmed in the early hours of this morning,

wiltshire police and partners have declared a major incident

after two people were hospitalized following their potential exposure

to an unknown substance.

I was so shocked.

I was so shocked when actually one of my special advisors,

when I'd been home secretary,

texted me and said, "it's happening again."

Oh, god.

[Rebecca] I was angry that the message had been

that Salisbury was completely safe for so long.

If Salisbury had been safe then...

The second incident wouldn't have happened.

You speak to the police and obviously they can't comment.

And all you want to know is are you safe?

Do you have to do anything?

Is your family gonna be safe?

Is there going to be a further escalation?

[Mills] A real challenge for us with the poisoning of Charlie

was to establish where the novichok was

between incident number one and incident number two.

Where was that novichok for that three month period?

[Rowley] The applicator had been left in Salisbury,

and clearly the police hadn't found it.

And, of course, you'll always look back on things like that and think,

is there something on my watch we could have done differently?

But in the absence of any clues for where they'd abandoned it,

I'm just not sure how we could have got there.

[Reporter 1] Spy affair news at 6:00.

[Reporter 2] Counter terror police aren't ruling out more people falling ill

as a result of the Salisbury spy poisoning.

Charlie rowley and dawn sturgess remain in a critical condition.

[Rebecca] Salisbury's not a big place.

You recognize and know a lot of people.

Dawn was someone who I'd often walked past

or seen on my way to and from work

who was now in hospital being treated

for a nerve agent attack.

Their photographs were passed around the tables,

and I realized the dawn that we're talking about

I'd spent some time with.

So I felt devastated

that she was so ill.

I spontaneously cried.

And, of course, she died later that day.

Someone died and it was a mom with three children.

And that is harrowing.

She was always bright and breezy up in the morning.

She was a morning girl.

Yeah, I think her name fitted her down to a t.

Yeah, she was a bright flame of light, love, and laughter in a little shell,

and she had so much love to give.

She liked glittery objects [Chuckling]

And took a chance on a perfume bottle.

So...

Yeah, real bright soul that I'm gonna miss daily.

I think dawn dying was a real...

It was a heartbreaking moment for the whole team.

Any patient who dies under our care affects us.

[Neil basu] It is both shocking and utterly appalling

that a British citizen has died having been exposed to a novichok nerve agent.

But make no mistake.

We are determined to find out how dawn and her partner Charlie rowley

came into contact with such a deadly substance.

The police liaison officers

got hold of me to confirm that it was novichok.

They organized for me to go to the hospital to visit Charlie.

He had so many machines around him,

and it was...

It was my brother.

It was heartbreaking to see it.

It really was.

I thought that was the last time I'm gonna see him.

[Charlie] When I came round out of my coma,

the police said about a perfume bottle that they'd found,

and they said it contained the nerve agent novichok.

I was like, "no, no. It was perfume."

When he woke up and came off the ventilator,

we had to explain to him what had happened.

And it fell to me to be the one to tell Charlie that dawn had died.

Yeah, I still to this day...

You know, it chokes me.

Yeah, it's my girlfriend I lost.

My partner.

My soul mate.

Mmm.

[Members of parliament] Hear, hear.

[Theresa may] With permission Mr. Speaker,

I would like to update the house on the investigation into the attempted murder

of Sergei and yulia skripal,

and the subsequent poisoning of dawn sturgess and Charlie rowley.

Since then, around 250 detectives

have trawled through more than 11,000 hours of cctv

and taken more than 1,400 statements.

Working around the clock,

they have carried out painstaking and methodical work

to ascertain exactly which individuals were responsible

and the methods they used to carry out this attack.

[Neil basu] Today we're releasing images of two individuals

Alexander Petrov and ruslan boshirov.

They're Russian nationals who traveled to this country on Russian passports.

The reason we're releasing that footage today is

we need the public's help.

We strongly believe they entered this country under aliases.

Somebody out there will recognize them.

Somebody out there knows them.

We'd like those people to come forward and tell us who they really are.

So, what we now know from the investigation is

that Petrov and boshirov come in via Gatwick

on Friday afternoon on the 2nd of march.

[Mills] On the day of the poisonings,

you've got these two white males dressed for the weather,

and they've got a backpack with them.

And we see them arrive at the train station

and then ultimately make their way out of the city.

We have good lines of inquiry

to try and establish who they are,

but I need the evidence.

I need somebody to come forward

and give me their real names.

[Roman dobrokhotov] They ask everybody for some more evidence

about what happened,

and it was pretty easy for us,

I mean the insider and bellingcat,

to investigate them.

They made so many very stupid mistakes.

My name is Roman dobrokhotov.

I'm editor-in-chief of the insider,

which is Russian investigative online media.

We found a lot of information.

When we started to pull it up,

we saw these people in passport database,

but all the passport info was empty.

It means that these are fake people.

These are not real identities.

We learned that boshirov and Petrov are really mishkin and chepiga.

Chepiga participated in the conflict in chechnya.

Mishkin was a military doctor, so he was supposed to save, actually, people's lives.

Not to kill them.

There is a picture of chepiga and Vladimir putin

where Vladimir putin is giving a medal of hero of Russia,

handing it directly to chepiga.

There were absolutely no doubt that this is an operation controlled by kremlin

through Russian military intelligence.

[Speaking Russian]

[Speaking Russian]

Perhaps the most extraordinary moment

in some ways in this case was

the interview the two Russian gru officers,

the military intelligence officers,

gave on Russia today.

[Speaking Russian]

I'm thinking it's dumb and dumber.

I think... I... You know, I don't know

what the Russians were thinking.

I mean, they... yeah.

I'm hugely surprised.

They were...

Maybe this was part of their joke.

They thought that people in britain would fall for this.

[Speaking Russian]

It's not like James Bond style spies.

It's more like Johnny English kind of spy.

I think probably in some ways it was the moment at which the rest of the world

woke up to the Russian disinformation campaign

and realized that actually what we had been telling them

about this case and about these two individuals really was true.

[Dobrokhotov] But this actually was only the beginning of the story

because we didn't believe that two people is enough

for this kind of operation.

So there must be a team helping them.

We found a third guy.

His real name is denis sergeev.

His fake name is sergey fedotov.

We found seven other gru agents participated in the Salisbury poisoning.

We found a lot of other spies.

We found chain of command.

Now we know almost everything about this program of extrajudicial murders

by Russian killing squads.

So, the police investigation has now got evidence

to a criminal standard

of three people involved in the attack.

We shouldn't assume that that's where the investigation finishes,

and we shouldn't assume that there were only three people involved.

Russian military intelligence would often deploy more people than that

for overseas assassinations.

[Alexander yakovenko] I think this is 1942.

So there's a war... [Camera clicking]

[Charlie] We got invited, me and my brother,

to see the Russian ambassador in London.

And he seemed very pleasant,

friendly,

but he was very much trying to pass the buck,

so to speak,

and it was all denial

all the way.

For us, this is the blessing from Russia.

I asked the ambassador if his country killed my girlfriend,

and he said, "no."

It's my flat.

It's the first flat that I've ever had.

They had to tear it down.

The perfume bottle that I had

could have wiped out thousands of people.

Thousands of people,

with the amount of nerve agent that was

in the perfume bottle found in my flat.

What I was told was that they had discovered that there was nerve agent

in almost every room of our house,

including my youngest daughter's bedroom.

[Mills] Wedding rings, watches,

items from family members...

We had to say to Nick and his family,

"sorry, you can take a couple of possessions we can test,

but actually the rest we're gonna have to, with partners, destroy."

That was a horrible moment.

[Nick] You know, the children lost their toys, their books,

their clothes, school certificates...

They lost everything that meant something to them.

We lost everything that meant something to us.

We had to move house

and we did lose about all of our belongings,

but I'm incredibly lucky that that's all we lost.

[Dr. Haslam] The whole community was affected by this.

It was a traumatizing experience.

I still feel emotional thinking about it.

And I would say I was, um...

Drained

physically, emotionally, mentally

for probably six months after this.

It took a toll on all of us.

I suppose one of the really unanswered questions

about the Salisbury affair is,

you know, have we found all of the novichok?

Was there another delivery device?

I personally believe they probably had a second perfume dispenser

because, you know, they wanted to be sure that they'd do a good job.

I believe that it wasn't the same bottle that poisoned the skripals

for the simple reason the poison turned up

three months after the initial poisoning.

It was in a box,

a sealed box in a sealed package,

which I had to break open

and physically put two parts of the pump together

to make it work.

[Rebecca] I don't think we know everything that there is to know

about the nerve agent attack,

and part of me thinks we probably won't ever know

the full ins and outs of what happened.

[Nick] I retired from the police in October 2018.

I was medically pensioned through grounds of ill-health.

I was deemed not to be able to be capable of being a police officer anymore

under mental health reasons

and psychological reasons

because of the Salisbury poisonings.

[Charlie] I literally poisoned my girlfriend.

You know, unknowingly,

but I still did it.

Killed my girlfriend.

You know?

It's not a good... Thing to live with.

Mmm.