who were found seriously ill in central Salisbury on 4 March 2018<\/a>. Both are believed to have made a full recovery.<\/p>\nWiltshire Police did not know at the time of the poisonings that Mr Skripal, who had been released in a prisoner swap, lived in the area. <\/p>\n
In the inquiry report, Lord Hughes said that when someone with a “sensitive background”, such as Mr Skripal, moves to the UK there should be a way to alert senior officers if “anything significant” happens to them. <\/p>\n
There had been failings in how Mr Skripal was managed, the report concluded, as regular written assessments were not carried out.<\/p>\n
But it had not been “unreasonable” to think the former spy was not at a high risk of assassination, Lord Hughes said, adding that additional security measures would not have prevented the poisoning.<\/p>\n
The only thing which may have avoided the attack was giving Mr Skripal a whole new identity, but the risk was not deemed severe enough in 2018 to warrant it and Mr Skripal would not have agreed to it, the report explained. <\/p>\n
It also said the attack on the Skripals had been “expected to stand as a public demonstration of Russian power” and “amounted to a public statement, both for international and domestic consumption, that Russia will act decisively in what it regards are its own interests”.<\/p>\n
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![\"Handout](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/d8ddf1e0-d0fe-11f0-a892-01d657345866.png.webp.webp\")
Handout<\/p>\n
“We can have Dawn back now,” say Ms Sturgess’ family<\/p>\n
Wiltshire Police apologised during the inquiry in late 2024 for wrongly referring to Ms Sturgess as a “well-known drug user”, with the inquiry looking into the similarities between symptoms of opioid overdose and nerve agent poisoning.<\/p>\n
As to whether emergency service first responders should have been warned about the risk of confusion between symptoms, Lord Hughes concluded this “did not make any difference” to the treatment of Ms Sturgess and “no alert could have saved her”. <\/p>\n
It also did not make “any significant difference to the treatment” of her partner, as the paramedics who cared for Mr Rowley had immediately suspected nerve agent poisoning and treated him accordingly.<\/p>\n
The inquiry also found it reasonable that members of the public in Salisbury had not been warned against picking up litter after the attack on the Skripals. <\/p>\n
This message was later issued after the death of Ms Sturgess.<\/p>\n
Lord Hughes said the “danger of adding public alarm was a real one” after the first incident and the likelihood of assassins abandoning a lethal substance so a member of the public could find it was “small”.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/398b8850-d12b-11f0-9d18-614b3678ebf8.jpg.webp.webp\")
<\/p>\n
Ms Sturgess’ family say the report has left them with “some unanswered questions”<\/p>\n
In a statement delivered after the report was publicly released, Lord Hughes said the mother-of-three’s death was “pointless and arbitrary”, adding she had been an “entirely innocent victim of the cruel and cynical acts of others”.<\/p>\n
The report concluded the care she received had been “entirely appropriate” and “no medical treatment could in fact have saved her life”. <\/p>\n
“She had sustained [an] unsurvivable brain injury,” Lord Hughes explained.<\/p>\n
Ms Sturgess’ family said they wanted to ensure what had happened to her did not happen to anyone else and there was “real concern” around what they claimed was a lack of recommendations from the report. <\/p>\n
Asked by a reporter about what the publication of the report meant to them, a family member replied: “We can have Dawn back now… she’s been public for seven years.<\/p>\n
“We can finally put her to peace, that’s all I’ve got to say.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sarah Turnnidge,International Dispute Resolution Centre, Londonand Harriet Robinson,West of England Handout Dawn Sturgess died in July 2018, eight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-325344","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Handout<\/p>\n![\"Reuters\/BBC](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/c1cb8450-86f3-11ef-bfa2-adeae0a2b0b1.png.webp.webp\")
Reuters\/BBC<\/p>\n