The name of the second suspect in the Salisbury case is actually Alexander Mishkin, the BBC understands. The Bellingcat investigative website says the man who travelled under the alias Alexander Petrov is in reality a military doctor working for Russian intelligence, the GRU.
President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday Russia had found the two men accused by British prosecutors of trying to murder ex- Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Britain, but that there was nothing criminal about them.
UK police have launched a murder inquiry after a woman who was exposed to the nerve agent novichok died in hospital on Sunday evening. Mother-of-three Dawn Sturgess, 44, died at Salisbury District Hospital, Scotland Yard said.
Two British citizens are critically ill after they were exposed to Novichok, the same nerve agent that struck down a former Russian agent and his daughter in March, Britain’s top counter-terrorism officer said on Wednesday.
Washington’s request that other countries also expel Russian diplomats is improper, Uruguay’s Foreign Minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa said. “I did not take this request well, I said it was improper and it should not have been made,” the top diplomat said as cited by the El Pais newspaper.
The UK will expel 23 Russian diplomats after Moscow refused to explain how a Russian-made nerve agent was used on a former spy in Salisbury, the PM says. Theresa May said the diplomats, who have a week to leave, were identified as “undeclared intelligence officers”. She also revoked an invitation to Russia's foreign minister, and said the Royal Family would not attend the Fifa World Cup later this year.
British Home Secretary is to make a Commons statement on the Salisbury poisoning mystery amid calls for a police investigation into 14 suspicious spying-related deaths in recent years. Amber Rudd will report to MPs on the dramatic disclosure by Scotland Yard that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a deadly nerve agent and targeted in an attempt to murder them.