by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
The British Government’s narrative that Russian military agents, on orders from President Vladimir Putin, used Novichok in Salisbury in March 2018 continues to collapse. A secret chemical warfare agent revealed last week that two tests for Novichok, using special machines provided by the Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory, failed to confirm an organophosphate poison in either Dawn Sturgess or her boyfriend, Charles Rowley.
The agent described himself in his witness statement and in a guarded appearance at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry last week as a qualified medical doctor and pharmacology expert. “I currently work at Dstl [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory] Porton Down within the Chemical, Biological and Radiological (CBR) Division, and provide medical advice to the Ministry of Defence and other government Departments on CBR related threats… I was Chemical and Biological (CB) Medical Advisor to Dstl and the Operational teams in support of the investigations into the attack on the Skripals (Operation WEDANA) and the investigation into the poisoning of Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley (Operation READ).”
The agent’s name was ordered to be kept secret by the Inquiry chairman and commercial consultant, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley). This is despite Hughes’s ruling that he would not keep the names secret of “those who were already sufficiently identified publicly in connection with the events of 2018.”
FT49 is the cipher used for the Porton Down agent, although sources claim he has advertised his engagement in the Skripal, Sturgess and Rowley cases in several academic publications accessible on the internet.
In his witness statement dated September 16, 2024, the Porton Down agent revealed that he had organized with doctors at the Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) to test the blood of Sturgess and Rowley, after their admission to the hospital on June 30, 2018, using special biochemical assay machines provided by Porton Down. One of the machines had been installed at SDH during the hospitalisation of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March of 2018. A second Porton Down machine was in operation at a Birmingham toxicology laboratory.
Agent FT49 reported these machines had failed to detect evidence of the Novichok organophosphate in blood samples of Sturgess and Rowley. Government officials then ordered Porton Down itself to take over the blood testing to confirm the presence of Novichok. This is the first leak from an official source that Porton Down may have rigged the blood testing in order to fabricate the existence of Novichok and of the Russian attack.
According to FT49, after “an unexpected failure to identify the organophosphate compounds by Birmingham’s analytical laboratory I suggested to Dr Jukes [Stephen Jukes, SDH doctor in charge of treating Sergei Skripal] that Dstl [Porton Down] should also receive a blood sample. Late morning of 2nd July 2018 I was made aware via a phone call from the ITU [Intensive Treatment Unit at SDH] that the Birmingham results were back; there was no evidence of a pesticide, despite cholinesterase inhibition, and the two patients [Sturgess and Rowley] did not have the same non-prescribed drugs in their blood other than a trace of cocaine.”
What this reveals is that both Sturgess and Rowley had been taking cocaine before their collapse. FT49 is also revealing – without expressly saying so — that on the day of their hospitalisation, Rowley had taken the heroin substitute methadone on prescription; Sturgess had not.
Presiding judge Hughes and the lawyers assisting him in their questioning of FT49 failed to acknowledge the new evidence. Michael Mansfield KC, lawyer for the Sturgess family and Rowley, attempted to neutralize the disclosure by asking FT49: “Were you ever informed that the police in fact had no information about the use of drugs by Dawn Sturgess? Did you know that?” FT49 replied non-committally.
The lawyer appointed by the British Government to represent Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Andrew Deakin (also spelled Deacon), asked FT49 no questions. Deakin has not opened his mouth at the hearings since making an 88-second announcement at the commencement. The Skripals, he claimed then, “look forward to better understanding the circumstances of the Salisbury attack, to considering the Inquiry’s conclusions as to who was responsible for that attack and to being able to move on with their lives.”
The revelations in plain view remain invisible. No British mainstream media and none of the alternative media podcasters in the UK have noticed and reported the Porton Down disclosures.
In his witness statement summary, FT49 claimed: “Sergey Skripal, Yulia Skripal, Nick Bailey [Wiltshire policeman] and Charlie Rowley were apparently all exposed to Novichok via the percutaneous route predominantly through skin contact with an object or touching an environmental surface (and there is also some evidence to suggest Mr Rowley may have inhaled a small amount of the Novichok).” FT49 omitted Sturgess from this list.
In questioning by Andrew O’Connor KC for the Inquiry, FT49 clarified that the Porton Down machine at SDH had reported the results of the Sturgess and Rowley blood samples too imprecisely to substantiate reliable diagnosis. A second attempt was therefore ordered from the toxicology laboratory in Birmingham.
Watch this documentary on Porton Down’s lethal poisoning record.
A leading British toxicology source adds: “the Birmingham tox lab would not report ‘trace cocaine’ without also mentioning and quantifying the cocaine metabolite, benzoylecgonine. It’s just bad science to use these phrases and not mention other drugs and metabolites. [Rowley] had a methadone script. It would be constantly present in his urine. Any tox lab would detect that. [He] was keen to get his methadone that afternoon — keen enough to let his partner go off on her own in an ambulance.”
FT49 was asked for the reason the blood analysis of Sturgess and Rowley was repeated in Birmingham after Salisbury, and then for a third attempt at Porton Down. “Would this be testing at the [Salisbury] hospital with the point of care [Porton Down] machine, do you think?” O’Connor asked FT49. “A. Yes, it would be.”
“Q. [O’Connor quoting FT49’s witness statement] ‘…had indicated ‘results consistent with cholinesterase inhibition’ and samples sent to Birmingham asking about drugs contaminated by pesticide. The further discussions with Dr Jukes established the patients were now being treated with pralidoxime and I asked about the degree of blood cholinesterase inhibition. In a text message that I sent later that night …’ So later on the Sunday night: ‘… to Dr Jukes I highlighted that if this was ‘really/significantly inhibited’ potent organophosphates could be possible. My thinking at this time was that establishing which type of organophosphate that could be responsible would require detailed analysis…’Using the labs: ‘… and if the Birmingham poisons laboratory did not identify the culprit chemical, a more obscure cause would need urgent investigation.” — page 161.
To understand the medical term, cholinesterase inhibition, click to read. Opiates like heroin and fentanyl also act to cause cholinesterase inhibition. FT49 testified that he and his superiors at Porton Down were determined to find organophosphates in the Sturgess and Rowley blood tests, and kept testing until they did. The Porton Down toxicology records remain undisclosed at the hearings. Here is FT49’s retelling of the sequence of his interaction with Stephen Jukes after Sturgess and Rowley were in intensive care at SDH.
Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/INQ005997.pdf
The expert medical witness who testified at the Inquiry last week immediately before FT49 was Dr Stephen Cockroft. He had been at the SDH Intensive Care Unit in charge of treatment for Yulia Skripal between March 4 and March 8 of 2018. His disclosure of Yulia’s recovery of consciousness and her communication with the medical staff on March 8 was reported here.
Left to right: Dr Stephen Cockroft; Yulia Skripal after her release from hospital; Dr Stephen Jukes.
Cockroft has reported discussing his diagnosis of the cause of the Skripals’ symptoms with his hospital colleagues. Questioned about this diagnosis, he told Dr James Haslam, who was in charge of Sergei Skripal at the time, that he was “considering poisoning by a strong acting synthetic opiate such as carfentanyl.” Asked to clarify during his testimony last week, Cockroft responded: “I said, carfentanyl and fentanyl. Unless you know an awful lot about these drugs — and as an anaesthetist I know an awful lot about fentanyl — one might assume that they are very similar drugs as they have very similar sounding names. Carfentanyl has a potency hundreds of thousands of times greater than fentanyl. Fentanyl itself is an extremely potent opiate. We use it as an anaesthetic agent and we use it daily and it is extremely dangerous in recreational hands. Carfentanyl is off the scale.” — page 27.
“Q. Yes. The way Dr Haslam described it yesterday, he said that, you know, carfentanyl is not a drug of abuse?
A. Yes.
Q. That would point to a poisoning?
A. Yes.
Q. Whereas fentanyl is a drug of abuse, isn’t it?
A. It is. Unfortunately it’s likely to produce in death, fentanyl, because it’s a very dangerous drug to abuse.
Q. Yes. But the difference for our purposes is that if we’re talking about fentanyl, that could still be on, if I can put it this way, the drugs overdose hypothesis, whereas carfentanyl is not a drug of abuse, it is a poisoning as opposed to an overdose, if I can put it that way?
A. It would definitely be an assassination attempt if one deployed carfentanyl. Yes. It could have only one purpose and that’s to kill.”
In a sentence Cockroft had introduced the possibility that the Skripals had been attacked by carfentanyl in an attempt to kill them. Left unsaid was that if true, the assassins weren’t – cannot have been — Russians spraying Novichok as Prime Minister Theresa May (lead image) announced in the House of Commons on March 12, 2018.
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