RUSSIA ATTEMPTED TO MURK ANOTHER SPY WHO DEFECTED TO THE U.K.!

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RUSSIA ATTEMPTED TO MURK ANOTHER SPY WHO DEFECTED TO THE U.K.!!!!!​



Critically ill man 'former Russian spy'
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Associated Press
Sergei Skripal, pictured here on the day of his sentencing in August 2006, was jailed for 13 years
A man who is critically ill after being exposed to an unknown substance in Wiltshire is a Russian national convicted of spying for Britain, the BBC understands.

Sergei Skripal, who is 66, was granted refuge in the UK following a "spy swap" between the US and Russia in 2010.

Police declared a major incident on Sunday after a man and a woman were reported ill at a shopping centre in Salisbury.

The substance has not been identified.

A number of locations in the city centre were cordoned off and the A&E department was closed.

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The hospital's A&E was closed on Monday while two people were treated
Skripal, who is a retired Russian military intelligence colonel, was jailed for 13 years in 2006 for spying for Britain.

He was convicted of passing the identities of Russian intelligence agents working undercover in Europe to the UK's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

Russia said Col Skripal had been paid $100,000 for the information, which he had been supplying from the 1990s.

He was one of four prisoners released by Moscow in 2010 in exchange for 10 US spies, as part of a swap.

Col Skripal was later flown to the UK.

He and a woman, thought to be in her 30s, are being treated at Salisbury District Hospital.

Police are investigating whether a crime has been committed, following the incident which began at 16:15 GMT on Sunday at the Maltings shopping centre in central Salisbury.

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Public Health England has not confirmed what the substance was
An area around the Maltings shopping centre and several other parts of the city were cordoned off as teams in full protective gear used hoses to decontaminate the street.

Neighbours at Skripal's home in Salisbury say police arrived around 17:00 GMT on Sunday and have been there ever since.

They said he was friendly and in recent years had lost his wife.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

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Were you in the area at the time? Have you been affected by the incident? You can share your experience by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.

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Russian spy critically ill after being 'poisoned' by unknown substance in Salisbury
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Sergei Skripal is being treated in hospital
A man who is critically ill after exposure to an unknown substance in Salisbury, is a former Russian spy, it is understood.

Sergei Skripal, 66, who was jailed in Russia for treason, but later came to the UK as part of a 'spy swap', collapsed in a shopping centre in Salisbury on Sunday.

He and a woman were rushed to hospital where they are still being treated.

It is thought the pair may have been exposed to the powerful synthetic drug, Fentanyl, which is up to 10,000 times more powerful than heroin and has been linked to scores of deaths in the UK.

A major incident was later declared at Salisbury hospital and its Accident & Emergency unit had to be closed.

In a statement, temporary Assistant Chief Constable, Craig Holden of Wiltshire Police, said: "The two people – a man aged in his 60s, and a woman aged in her 30s – were found unconscious on a bench in The Maltings in Salisbury.

“Police officers, as well as colleagues from the ambulance and fire services attended the scene and cordons were put in place.

“The pair, who we believe are known to each other, did not have any visible injuries and were taken to Salisbury District Hospital. They are currently being treated for suspected exposure to an unknown substance. Both are currently in a critical condition in intensive care."

“Because we are still at the very early stages of the investigation, we are unable to ascertain whether or not a crime has taken place."

Mr Skripal is a former Russian army colonel, who was convicted of passing the identities of Russian agents working in Europe to MI6.

In 2006 he was sentenced to 13 years in jail for spying for Britain, with Russian prosecutors claiming he had taken tens of thousands of pounds of the security services.

He came to the UK in 2010 as part of a spy swap, and later settled in Salisbury, Wiltshire.













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Former Russian spy critically ill in UK 'after exposure to substance'
Sergei Skripal, 66, and woman in 30s found unconscious on bench in Salisbury shopping centre
Patrick GreenfieldMon 5 Mar 2018 14.47 EST
One of the two people critically ill in hospital in Salisbury after “suspected exposure to an unknown substance” is a Russian man who was exchanged in a high-profile “spy swap” in 2010, the Guardian understands.

Sergei Skripal, 66, was one of four Russians exchanged for 10 deep cover “sleeper” agents planted by Moscow in the US.

Wiltshire police said that a man in his 60s and a woman in her 30s were found unconscious on a bench in the Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury on Sunday afternoon.

Temporary Ast Ch Con Craig Holden said: “The pair, who we believe are known to each other, did not have any visible injuries and were taken to Salisbury district hospital. They are currently being treated for suspected exposure to an unknown substance. Both are currently in a critical condition in intensive care.

“Because we are still at the very early stages of the investigation, we are unable to ascertain whether or not a crime has taken place. A major incident has been declared today and a multi-agency response has been co-ordinated.

“Alongside our partner agencies, we are conducting some extensive enquiries to determine exactly what led to these two people falling unconscious and clarify whether or not any criminal activity has happened.”

Passerby Freya Church saw the pair at the Maltings. She told the BBC: “On the bench there was a couple – and older guy and a younger girl. She was leant in on him. It looked like she’d passed out. He was doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky. I felt anxious, like I should step in but they looked so out of it. They looked like they had been taking something quite strong.”

Skripal is a former Russian army colonel who was convicted of passing the identities of Russian agents working undercover in Europe to MI6 in 2006. He arrived in the UK as part of a high-profile spy swap in 2010.

He was sentenced in August 2006 in Russia to 13 years in jail for spying for Britain after being convicted of “high treason in the form of espionage”. Russian prosecutors said he had been paid $100,000 (£72,000) by MI6 for information which he had been supplying since the 1990s when he was a serving officer.

He was flown to the UK as part of an exchange which involved the notorious group of deep cover “sleeper” agents planted by Moscow in the US, including a diplomat’s daughter, being taken to Moscow.

It had been assumed that Skripal had been given a new identity, home, and pension.

Earlier on Monday it was suggested that fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times stronger than heroin, which can be fatal in small doses, may have been involved in the incident.

Skripal’s sudden and unexplained illness will invite comparisons with the poisoning in 2006 of another Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko.

Litvinenko – a former officer with the FSB spy agency – fell ill after drinking a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium. He met his killers on 1 November 2006, in a ground-floor bar of the Millennium hotel in Mayfair, central London.

The pair were Andrei Lugovoi – a former KGB officer turned businessman, who is now a deputy in Russia’s state Duma – and Dmitry Kovtun, a childhood friend of Lugovoi’s from a Soviet military family.

Litvinenko’s murder caused international scandal and led to years of estrangement between Moscow and London. Putin denied all involvement and refused to extradite either of the killers from Moscow.

A painstaking investigation by Scotland Yard revealed that the assassins took three attempts to kill Litvinenko, with two botched plots the previous month. They eventually succeeded by putting a tiny amount of polonium-210 in a teapot. Litvinenko drank only three or four sips and died in agony 23 days later.

Detectives were able to reconstruct the killers’ movements across London – after discovering radioactive traces in hotels, restaurants and a nightclub in Soho. The killers disposed of excess polonium by pouring it down the u-bend of their hotel sink.

Christopher Steele – then a senior MI6 officer and the subsequent author of the Trump dossier – led an inquiry by government into the killing. He swiftly concluded that the Kremlin was behind the assassination. Only Russia had the capacity to produce polonium, which can only be obtained from a nuclear reactor.

A public inquiry in 2015 and 2016 heard five months of evidence, including secret submissions from UK spy agencies. Its chairman, Sir Robert Owen, concluded that the FSB had murdered Litvinenko, assigning Lugovoi and Kovtun to carry out the mission.

Owen also ruled that Vladimir Putin had “probably approved” the operation, together with the FSB’s then chief Nikolai Patrushev.

Alex Goldfarb, a friend of Litvinenko who helped him escape Russia in 2000, said the Skripal case was suggestive of a Russian plot.

“What’s interesting now is that this happens just before Russia’s presidential election,” he said. “Putin awarded Lugovoi a state honour and made him a national hero. He apparently sees positive electoral gain from this kind of activity.

Goldfarb added: “Russia is a nationalistic country where state-run propaganda portrays the UK as the enemy and people like Skripal as traitors.”
 
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Sergei Skripal: does revenge for treason lie behind harm to ex-spy?
Sergei Skripal: does revenge for treason lie behind harm to ex-spy?


Observers note ominous pattern of ‘bad luck’ befalling family of pardoned Russian colonel

Luke Harding

Tue 6 Mar 2018 12.06 ESTLast modified on Tue 6 Mar 2018 18.45 EST

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Sergei Skripal, who is critically ill in a Salisbury hospital after ‘suspected exposure to an unknown substance’. Photograph: Handout
Inside a van, and rattling towards the airport, Sergei Skripal was in high spirits. It was July 2010. Without explanation Skripal had been taken from a penal colony, where he had spent the previous five and a half years, and transported in handcuffs to Moscow. Now he was about to board a flight to Vienna. His ultimate destination: Britain.

Unlikely though it seemed, Skripal was about to be swapped in classic cold war fashion. On the tarmac at Vienna airport he was to be exchanged for 10 Russian “sleeper agents” caught by the FBI and on their way home to Moscow. Heading in the other direction were three fellow Russians, including Igor Sutyagin. All were accused of working for UK or US intelligence.

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Who is the Salisbury spy Sergei Skripal? – video explainer
Sutyagin had been shovelling cinders on to a path in his prison compound in Russia’s Arctic north when he was told he should prepare to go. He found himself in the same van as Skripal, under guard and trundling towards freedom. “I talked to him for several hours,” Sutyagin said. “We were in the same van and then in the same plane.”

Russian penal colonies are notoriously tough. The biggest privation for Skripal, Sutyagin said, was separation from his family – his wife, Liudmilla, daughter Yulia and grown-up son. For much of his time in prison, following a conviction in 2006 for passing secrets to MI6, Skripal was incarcerated in Mordovia, more than 300 miles south-east of Moscow. This was a grim place of watchtowers and barbed wire.

“Sergei was excited about being reunited with his family. It seemed to me they were his major joy. I think family played a very important role in his life,” Sutyagin said. However, the swap agreement raised a dilemma for Sutyagin and Skripal. They were allowed to take one family member with them. Who, they wondered, should they take with them into exile?

Once in the UK their paths diverged. Sutyagin became a fellow at a thinktank, the Royal United Services Institute, gave lectures on Vladimir Putin’s darkening state, and kept a high public profile. Skripal, by contrast, eschewed London. He settled with Liudmilla in the comparative quiet of Wiltshire.

Skripal did not exactly vanish. His semi-detached four-bedroom home, bought in 2011 for £260,000, was registered in his own name. In Russia, Skripal had worked for military intelligence and the GRU, the most powerful and secret of Russia’s three spy agencies. He reached the rank of colonel. Now, at least officially, he was a retired local government planning officer.

In provincial south-west England was he at least safe? The answer is, we don’t yet know. On Sunday afternoon Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found in a comatose state on a bench in the centre of Salisbury. This followed exposure to what police describe as “an unknown substance”. They are both critically ill in hospital. Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism unit is involved.

There are few details about what, if anything, might have caused their terrible symptoms, or what might have befallen Skripal nearly eight years after he exited Moscow. Inevitably, though, the case invites comparison with the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in Mayfair by two Kremlin assassins. The killers used a weapon of low-key English style: a cup of (deadly) tea.

Litvinenko was a former FSB officer who had escaped to the UK in 2000 with his wife, Marina, and small son, Anatoly. From London he waged a ferocious campaign against Putin, in conjunction with another Kremlin irritant abroad, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was found dead in 2012 at the Berkshire home of his former wife. Police believe it was suicide. Berezovsky’s friends are not so sure.

Skripal’s case is different. The Russian security service FSB viewed Litvinenko unambiguously as a traitor. But Skripal received a pardon in 2010 from Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president at the time; in cold war times this should have made him untouchable. He had betrayed the motherland but admitted his crime (he pleaded guilty and got 13 years). He was swapped as part of a state-to-state deal.


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A police cordon in Salisbury, erected after Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious on a nearby bench on Sunday. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
The methods of the cold war continue as Russia’s seeks to influence western democracies and push favoured candidates – including the US president, Donald J Trump.

But the ideology which shaped the 20th century has gone, making Putin’s revisionist Russia more unpredictable and more dangerous. In 2016 a public inquiry said that Putin “probably approved” Litvinenko’s assassination. Given the response from the British authorities then – a few Russian diplomats kicked out, the killers’ extradition sought – some observers believe Skripal’s case is Litvinenko II.

“Putin has done it once and effectively got away with it. Why would he not do it again?” one Russia expert, with links to British intelligence, said on Tuesday.

Sutyagin, speaking on a mobile phone by the side of a road, said that any rational assessment would rule out Kremlin involvement. In a matter of days Putin will be “elected” president for a fourth time; there is no question who will win (all genuine political opposition was squashed long ago) but the Kremlin is keen to achieve a high turn-out in the presidential election. “This is the worse possible time,” Sutyagin observed.

And, it has to be noted, several Russian defectors continue to live in the UK. They include Oleg Gordievsky, the designated head of the KGB’s London station, who had been secretly working for British intelligence since 1974. In 1985 MI6 smuggled him out of the Soviet Union. His information proved a goldmine for British spies, and historians.

Another is Viktor Suvorov, a former GRU officer who defected in the 1970s from the Soviet mission in Switzerland. He now writes books. (Suvorov’s novel Aquarium opens with a GRU officer who betrayed secrets being fed alive into the in-house crematorium – a scene based on a chilling real-life black and white video, shown to all GRU recruits.)

Still, Sutyagin recognises that the siloviki faction in Russia’s government, made up of hardline former KGB and GRU officers, takes a dim view of treachery.

“I was once told by a Russian diplomat that Putin had compared me to Judas. That is their attitude,” Sutyagin said.

Alex Goldfarb, Litvinenko’s friend, said: “They had a motive. There is a history for these kinds of actions.”

Tragically, the family life that Skripal yearned for while behind bars was cut short. Liudmilla died in October 2012, apparently from natural causes; she had been suffering from cancer of the womb. Yulia reported her death. In recent years Yulia has been living in the UK, working for Nike and at the Holiday Inn in Southampton.

According to relatives, Skripal’s son died during a trip to St Petersburg with his girlfriend. He was 43. What killed him is not known. There are also suggestions that Skripal’s brother died recently too. Now Skripal and his daughter are fighting for their lives in hospital. It’s possible, of course, that the family has simply had bad luck. But if there is a pattern here it’s an ominous one.

After his flight from Russia Suvorov got to know Litvinenko. The Litvinenkos lived in Muswell Hill, London. On one occasion they were the victims of a mysterious firebombing. On another a Russian diplomat banged on their front door. Given this harassment why didn’t the Litvinenkos consider moving out to the country, to somewhere safer, Suvorov suggested?

Litvinenko ignored the advice. He remained in the capital. In 2003 he started working as an expert on organised crime for MI6. His killers first tried to poison him, during a business meeting in Mayfair in October 2006, hours after they got to Gatwick airport from Moscow. They succeeded three weeks later, in November, escaping out of Heathrow before Scotland Yard had any inkling about what had happened.

Skripal was no Litvinenko. He must have assumed that Moscow had forgotten about him. It is understood he had nothing to do with the dossier on Russia and Trump written by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Before Steele went into private business he led MI6’s response to Litvinenko’s murder. Skripal was not a source and whatever he knew about Russian military intelligence was long out of date.

Nevertheless, if he is a victim of Kremlin malfeasance the message is clear. There is no statute of limitation for treason. Russia’s spy agencies do not forgive and do not forget. The old cold war rules that once governed spying – ours and theirs – no longer apply.
 
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starting to look like a hit, if it wasn't his daughter I'd thought a little hard drug use and an od.
 
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