Gargantuan clean-up effort after Novichok nerve agent poisoning laid bare

Salisbury wasn’t a particularly well-known city internationally – except, apparently, by those wanting to visit medieval cathedrals with 123m spires or historically-interesting clocks. That all changed on 4 March 2018, when it became the site of the first ever use of a nerve agent on European soil. The small city was abruptly catapulted onto the world stage and the global media descended.

A former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia found slumped unconscious on a city centre bench, with no visible signs of injury, was the first indication something was amiss. Police officers visited his home as part of their investigations, and shortly afterwards one was also taken seriously ill. A few days later it was announced that analytical chemists at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) at nearby Porton Down had found the culprit – a nerve agent. This was later revealed to be one of a group of organophosphate nerve agents known as Novichok. Developed in Russia in the 1970s and 80s, publicly-available information about these agents is scarce and the exact Novichok used in Salisbury has not been released to the public.