Vladimir Putin is ‘morally responsible’ for the death of Dawn Sturgess, a public inquiry today has concluded. The mother of three died in Salisbury in June 2018 after unknowingly spraying herself with the nerve agent novichok, which had been discarded three months earlier by two Kremlin agents sent to kill the former spy Sergei Skripal. The operation was so sensitive that it ‘must have been authorised at the highest level by President Putin’ as a ‘demonstration of Russian power’, the inquiry’s chair Lord Hughes said.

Keir Starmer condemned the Kremlin’s ‘disregard for innocent lives’

Lord Hughes said that disguising the novichok in a perfume bottle ‘dramatically magnified’ the risk of unintended casualties, and called it ‘an astonishingly reckless act’. Sturgess was given the perfume bot

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