Russian President Vladimir Putin "must have" authorized the nerve agent attack that accidentally killed a British woman in 2018, and he bears "moral responsibility" for her death, according to a British inquiry published on Thursday.
Dawn Sturgess, 44, died four months after a team of Russian military intelligence agents put the nerve agent, Novichok, in a perfume bottle in Salisbury, England, after using it as a target for former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal, who had passed secrets to Britain. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned near their home after the poison was placed on a doorknob. Despite their serious condition, they survived the poisoning.
In a report published on Thursday, a public inquiry into Sturgess's death found that she died as a result of a bottle she thought was perfume. The bottle was found by her partner, who later gave it to her as a gift, unaware of its true contents. Sturgess died after applying Novichok to her wrists, becoming the victim of an attempted assassination. So the target was Skripal and Sturgess was the victim.
Presenting the findings at a press conference, the head of the team that conducted the investigation, Anthony Hughes, a former judge at the Supreme Court in Britain, said that the operation targeting Skripal "must have been authorised at the highest level, in fact by President Putin", and was intended "to appear as a public demonstration of Russian power".
Hughes said Sturgess, who had three children, was the victim of an "astonishingly reckless" attack that had put "an unspecified number of innocent people who were not connected to espionage at risk."
The investigation found that "there is a direct fatal link" between Sturgess's death and the actions of the Russian intelligence agents who carried out the mission, their supervisors and Putin himself. "They, and they alone, bear moral responsibility for this," he said.
The Russian government has denied involvement in the Skripal attack. Two men charged by British prosecutors said in an interview with Russia Today in 2018 that they were sports supplement sellers and that they had visited Salisbury “because of its internationally renowned cathedral.”