By Ben Kerrigan-
The second person found unconscious in Salisbury alongside the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal is his 33-year-old daughter.
Yulia Skripal, discovered on a bench next to her father on Sunday, was reportedly poisoned and is in a critical condition in hospital.
The apparent poisoning of the pair follows the death of Skripal’s wife, Liudmila, in 2012. She arrived in Britain with her husband – who was swapped in 2010 as part of a spy exchange – and had lived with him in Wiltshire.
Police are still trying to establish what substance 66 year old Skripal, and his daughter were exposed to in Salisbury at the weekend. Both father and daughter remain in critical condition and in intensive care, police said.
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The bench where the pair collapsed unconscious in the Maltings shopping centre next to the river Avon remained cordoned off, as was a Zizzi restaurant, which police said had been shut as a precaution. Wiltshire police revealed a third premises nearby, the Bishop’s Mill pub, had also been sealed off.
The pair’s sudden and unexplained illness is reminiscent with the poisoning in 2006 of another Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, whose death sparked a major international incident.
The UK’s leading counter-terrorism officer said his specialists were supporting the investigation.
The Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said on Tuesday: “Clearly it’s a very unusual case and the critical thing is to get to the bottom of what has caused this incident as quickly as possible
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As you would expect, the specialist resources that sit within the counter-terrorism network that I coordinate across the country and other partners are working with Wiltshire police to get to the bottom of that as quickly as possible.”
scene, we are doing toxicology work. That will help us get to an answer. I can’t say any more at this stage.”
Asked about a series of suspicious Russian-linked deaths in the UK, Rowley said:
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“There are deaths which attract attention. I think we have to remember that Russian exiles are not immortal, they do all die and there can be a tendency for some conspiracy theories. But likewise we have to be alive to the fact of state threats, as illustrated by the Litvinenko case.”