Military personnel wearing protective equipment prepare to cover two ambulances involved in a nerve gas attack in Salisbury, England. Authorities are investigating the March 4 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. The former intelligence agent was granted refuge in the United Kingdom after a spy swap in 2010.
To pedestrians passing outside the Maltings shopping center in Salisbury, England, on the afternoon of March 4, the pair slumped on a bench appeared to be another tragic case of opioid overdose. The younger woman was unconscious, having lost control of her bodily functions, and was propped against the older man, himself twitching and mumbling in an incoherent manner. But as police arrived at the scene and identified the victims, it soon became clear that this was not an accidental narcotics overdose. The man, 66-year-old Sergei Skripal, was a former colonel in Russia's military intelligence service (known as the GRU) and had been recruited by Britain's foreign intelligence service (MI6) in the 1990s. He had come to the United Kingdom in 2010 as part of a high-profile spy swap. The woman next to him was his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, who had come to Salisbury from Russia to visit her father.
