The Salisbury poisonings and the idiocies of Craig Murray

The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry finally got under way last month. As you would expect, the proceedings initially concentrated on the specific circumstances of Sturgess’s death in 2018 due to accidental contact with the nerve agent novichok. During the second week, however, the inquiry shifted to an examination of the earlier poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The evidence presented there cast some important light onto the events of 4 March 2018, which ended with both the Skripals hospitalised in an ICU after falling seriously ill in Salisbury city centre, having been contaminated with the same type of nerve agent that killed Dawn Sturgess four months later.

The case of the Salisbury poisonings provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorists, among the most prolific of whom was self-styled “journalist” Craig Murray. In a series of bizarre articles posted during the months after the poisoning of the Skripals, Murray variously attributed responsibility for the attack to British security services, the authors of the Trump-Russia dossier, Mossad, Saudi Arabia, Syrian jihadists, NATO, Ukraine, Georgia and Russian gangsters. As I wrote at the time: “The only consistency here has been Murray’s insistence on disparaging any evidence of Russian state involvement by promoting alternative wild theories of his own, none of which had any evidential basis.”

Regrettably, Murray’s nonsense was endorsed by people who should have known better. Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani hailed Murray as “the only person who conducted anything resembling investigative journalism around the Skripal story”. Jonathan Cook agreed that Murray was “almost alone in asking troubling questions about the British government’s strenuous efforts — in the absence of any obvious evidence — to put Russia in the frame for the poisoning of the Skripals”. Defending Murray against his detractors, Cook wrote that “anyone like Murray who thinks critically — who assumes that the powerful will seek to promote their interests and avoid accountability — is instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or in Putin’s pocket”.

Murray’s questioning of the official version of events on the day of the attack relied heavily on the uncertainty surrounding the Skripals’ movements during the period before they drove into the city centre that afternoon, where they were later found collapsed on a bench suffering from novichok poisoning. In September 2018, in an ill-researched article titled “Skripals — The Mystery Deepens” (which George Galloway nevertheless applauded as “brilliant forensic work”) Murray presented the following sequence of events:

“At 09.15 on Sunday 4 March the Skripals’ car was seen on CCTV driving through three different locations in Salisbury. Both Skripals had switched off their mobile phones and they remained off for over four hours, which has baffled geo-location. There is no CCTV footage that indicates the Skripals returning to their home…. The Skripals were next seen on CCTV at 13.30, driving down Devizes road. After that their movements were clearly witnessed or recorded until their admission to hospital.”

The police first made an appeal on 17 March for witnesses to the Skripals’ alleged morning travels. Neil Basu, the then National Lead for Counter Terrorisn Policing, was quoted as saying: “We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia’s movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday, 4 March, Sergei’s car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road.”

An accompanying timeline stated that the car had been “seen” in that vicinity, although the source of the sighting was not specified. Neither then nor subsequently did the police say that the Skripals’ car journey had been caught “on CCTV”. It appears that Murray just made that up.

Regarding the claim that the Skripals’ had their mobile phones disconnected for four hours, Murray wrote that this had been “universally reported”. In reality the story originated with the Sun on Sunday, not exactly a byword for in-depth investigative reporting, and the paper cited a single anonymous informant whose relationship if any to the police inquiry was not stated. With the exception of fellow News Corp title the Sunday Times, and the Daily Mirror, there appears to have been very little media take-up of the Sun’s poorly substantiated report. Predictably, though, the Russian embassy seized on the story as part of its campaign to muddy the waters around the Salisbury attack.

In any case, even if the Skripals really had driven to London Road on the morning of 4 March, as Murray insisted they did, the obvious purpose would have been to visit the cemetery there, where Sergei Skripal’s wife and son were buried. An entirely innocent reason for switching off their mobiles, which Murray refused to consider, would have been that in those circumstances they didn’t want to take calls or be disturbed by their phones ringing.

Murray’s claim that the Skripals were “next seen on CCTV” early in the afternoon driving down Devizes Road was also inaccurate. Their car was indeed caught on camera as it passed the Devizes Inn pub heading towards the city centre. The Daily Mirror, which published a video clip on its website, gave the time as 1.35pm. But Murray ignored the fact that the Mirror also provided CCTV footage from two minutes earlier, showing Sergei Skripal’s burgundy BMW travelling north towards Devizes Road on India Avenue, only a few hundred yards from his house in Christie Miller Road.

As I pointed out at the time, irrespective of whether Sergei and Yulia did make their morning excursion to London Road, it was clear from the India Avenue CCTV footage that they must have been at home around 1.30pm, when they left the house to drive into town.

Murray’s article was posted on 6 September 2018, in response to a police statement the previous day that two Russians travelling under the names of Ruslan Boshirov and Aleksandr Petrov had been identified as suspects in the poisoning of the Skripals. CCTV images were provided showing that the two men, later revealed to be GRU operatives Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, arrived at Salisbury station at 11.48am on 4 March and were then spotted at 11.58am in the vicinity of Sergei Skripal’s residence.

Earlier in the investigation the front door of Skripal’s house had been established as “ground zero” of the novichok contamination, and police not unreasonably took the proximity of Boshirov and Petrov to the scene of the crime as prima facie evidence they were responsible for committing it. If so, they must have applied the nerve agent to the door handle some time after 11.58am but before they returned to the city centre. (In 2018 police published a CCTV image of the two men in central Salisbury at 1.05pm. The Sturgess Inquiry was told that they “arrived back in the area of the railway station shortly before 12.30 pm” having returned via Devizes Road.) That was in line with the Skripals leaving home around 1.30pm to drive into town. They would have touched the door handle as they exited the house.

This explains why Murray was so determined to assert that CCTV footage had been found confirming that the Skripals were out and about in the Salisbury area from 9.15am. It enabled him to claim there was no equivalent CCTV evidence that the pair later came back to Christie Miller Road — and, as he was eager to point out, the Skripals could hardly have been contaminated with novichok at Sergei’s house if they weren’t there. Murray thought it was “very much more probable that they came into contact with the nerve agent somewhere else, while they were out”.

As for the presence of Boshirov and Petrov, he had a ready explanation: “It appears very likely their appearance was to do with the Skripals on that day. But they may have been meeting them, outside the home. The evidence points to that, rather than doorknobs. Such a meeting might explain why the Skripals had turned off their mobile phones to attempt to avoid surveillance.” There was of course no evidence whatsoever that the Skripals had held a clandestine meeting with Boshirov and Petrov. The meeting was entirely a product of Murray’s imagination.

Even before the revelations at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry there were grounds for doubting whether the story about the Skripals’ morning travels, for which no actual proof was ever produced, had any basis in fact. In the second edition of his book The Skripal Files, published five years ago, Mark Urban wrote: “Yulia was insistent that she had not visited her brother’s plot in the cemetery at all before the poisoning. That caused the detectives to re-think previous theories about the Skripals’ possible movements on the Sunday morning — ideas that they had spent a great deal of time investigating. Indeed, the police would discard the idea that father and daughter had been out at all before they set out to have lunch in the town centre.”

This was confirmed in statements submitted by the Skripals to the Sturgess Inquiry: “I stayed at home all morning and did not drive anywhere until we got ready to set off to go for lunch together…. If someone says our car was on London Road they are wrong…. We planned to visit the cemetery but we never did it because of the attack” (INQ006086 Sergei Skripal Witness Statement October 2024). “I did not leave the house on 4 March 2018 before my dad and I took the car into Salisbury city centre together for lunch. As far as I am aware, neither did my dad” (INQ006087_5 Yulia Skripal Witness Statement October 2024).

So where did the story about the London Road sighting come from? In his evidence to the inquiry Dominic Murphy, head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, described how a retired minister named John Hiles reported that he had followed the Skripals’ car when driving down London Road at around 9.15am on 4 March. (Transcript here.) The police interviewed Hiles and took a statement from him. They “then checked CCTV to see if Mr Hiles’ sighting was relevant, but obviously we found no evidence of the vehicle moving on CCTV”. After further information became available, they concluded that Hiles was mistaken and the car had in fact remained at Christie Miller Road until the Skripals drove to the city centre in the afternoon.

Earlier Murphy had discussed the digital evidence supporting the Skripals’ statements that they had been at home throughout the morning of 4 March. This consisted of records of computer usage from 8.30am through to 1.10pm by both of the Skripals, which involved such sinister activities as accessing online banking, checking emails, googling, watching YouTube videos, and online shopping. (The relevant document can be found here.) The story promoted by both Murray and the Russian embassy, according to which the Skripals were secretly moving around Salisbury during that period, with their mobile phones switched off in order to avoid detection, is demonstrably false.

In short, Craig Murray’s theories about the Skripals’ movements on the morning of 4 March were shown to be completely divorced from reality. Will Murray learn any lessons from this? I very much doubt it. So far, he has shown no sign of overcoming his predilection for conspiracist fantasies. As the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry opened he proposed yet another evidence-free scenario, in which she was murdered by the British state with the assistance of the military research laboratory at nearby Porton Down:

“Dawn Sturgess died six miles from the official UK govt facility that manufactures novichok ‘for test purposes’…. Her death reinforced the official Salisbury narrative at a time when public scepticism was growing. I am pretty sure poor Dawn, who had fallen on hard times and was just the kind of person the Establishment views as dispensable, was a victim of state violence. I am quite certain that if so, it was not the Russians.”

Although Murray is widely regarded as a bit of a crank, this sort of thing goes beyond mere eccentricity. Frankly, the guy is clearly unhinged. On the personal level you can sympathise with someone in that state of mind. But those on the left who portray Murray’s delusional ideas as a serious contribution to political journalism really need to have a rethink.

First published on Medium in November 2024