The inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess has confirmed that she died from exposure to a Novichok nerve agent disguised in a perfume bottle that her partner had found in Salisbury. It concludes that the Novichok was most likely from the same batch as that involved in the attack on the Skripals four months earlier, and that it was produced in Russia.
The inquiry by Lord Hughes of Ombersley remarked that leaving behind this substantial amount of unused Novichok by Russian agents was ‘an astonishingly reckless thing to do, given the potential of even a small quantity to kill many thousands of innocent people’.
Dawn was 44 years old when she died in June 2018 in her partner Charlie Rowley’s flat in Amesbury. Rowley had given Sturgess a small bottle that purported to be a perfume by Nina Ricci, which he’d found. She applied the ‘perfume’ to her wrists and probably inhaled it. In fact, the substance was an organophosphate nerve agent. Rowley became gravely ill but survived.
Timeline
How the Novichok poisonings unfolded
March 2018
Shock discovery
Former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were discovered collapsed in Salisbury. UK authorities confirmed that a little known family of nerve agents – Novichoks – was used
April 2018
Nerve agent type confirmed
The OPCW, the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, confirms that a ‘Novichok-type’ agent was used in Salisbury
June 2018
Amesbury poisonings
Two civilians – Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess – fall ill in a town close to Salisbury, with Sturgess later dying. Both were poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent
July 2018
Disguised nerve agent container found
The container holding the Novichok agent is found disguised as a perfume bottle. It is presumed that this is the agent used in the attacks on the Skripals
September 2018
Police named Russian suspects
Two Russian nationals – Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin – named as suspects in the poisoning of the Skripals by UK police
March 2019
Decontamination complete
Clean-up of sites in Amesbury and Salisbury affected by Novichok contamination declared complete by UK authorities
September 2020
Russian opposition figure poisoned
German government reports that Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent
November 2021
Public inquiry announced
Inquiry into death of Dawn Sturgess in Amesbury announced
December 2025
Russia responsible
Inquiry into death of Dawn Sturgess finds that the Russian state was responsible for her death
Wiltshire Police assumed that the case was drug-related, partly because Rowley was a known intravenous opiate user. Lord Hughes noted that this view prevailed over anyone else’s doubts, and particularly over those of the paramedics, one of whom had also attended the Salisbury incident and believed that there was a real possibility of organophosphate poisoning. The police issued a warning aimed at local drug users. One possibility considered was that a bad batch of drugs had been contaminated with organophosphates.
The inquiry had some harsh words for this mixed messaging, notes Alistair Hay, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Leeds, who has expertise in the effects of chemical warfare agents. Some symptoms of opiate poisoning, such as pupil contraction, slowed heart rate, depressed breathing and coma, overlap with those of organophosphate poisoning, but the two victims had symptoms that did not, such as sweating and drooling, which are indicative of organophosphates’ effects on the nervous system.
‘There should have been sharing of information between emergency services about this overlap, and there wasn’t,’ Hay says. ‘Many in the police service were unaware of this commonality of symptoms and regarded the poisonings of Charlie and Dawn as likely to have been by opiates. Fortunately, the paramedics attending Charlie Rowley also suspected organophosphate poisoning and gave him antidotes for both opiate and organophosphate poisoning before he reached hospital, probably saving his life. Nothing could have saved Dawn Sturgess as she had irreversible brain damage because her heart was estimated to have stopped beating some 30 minutes before paramedics reached her.’
Following a painstaking and comprehensive investigation, all the events leading up to Dawn’s tragic death are now laid out in the long-delayed public inquiry. But what has the inquiry told us that we didn’t already know?
Some light has been shed on how the bottle containing Novichok came to be in the possession of Rowley. Media speculation at the time had focused on why the Novichok container had turned up 15 miles away in Amesbury a whole three months after the attack on the Skripals. Was it a backup nerve agent bottle later discarded? The inquiry concluded that Dawn’s partner most likely found the Novichok container somewhere in Salisbury, packaged as a perfume, days after the March 2018 attack and put it away in his room for another day. After an argument with Dawn in June he gave her the perfume as a gift. Unfortunately, his memory of events around this time was deemed unreliable, owing to a number of factors including Novichok exposure that almost killed him.
There was also confusion at the time of the poisonings, as to whether the Novichok perfume was in sealed packaging, leading some to speculate that it had never been opened and could be the hypothesised backup Novichok bottle. The report again explains that two heavy duty plastic sachets were found in the bin at the flat. It is believed that these originally contained the Novichok container and were professionally sealed following the creation of the nerve agent. These bags were then reused after the attack on the Skripals, with the perfume bottle crudely repackaged using a domestic heat sealer.
The inquiry provided Sturgess’s family with some of the answers they sought. However, they disagreed with the inquiry’s conclusions that the state wasn’t at fault for failing to consider the risks to the public of having a former Russian spy living openly in the community. The family are now calling for lessons to be learned so that the public can be better protected in cases where known individuals might be at risk of being targeted by foreign governments.
Patrick Walter, news editor
Overall, Hay is impressed by the thoroughness of the report. ‘What a fabulous piece of detective work by all involved, from the police, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) scientists, paramedics, clinicians etc, and counsel to the inquiry.’
He explains that the detailed explanation for linking the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings to the same batch of Novichok are in a confidential report, which has not been made public. ‘The Novichok used to poison the Skripals and Charlie Rowley, and kill Dawn Sturgess was some 98% pure,’ he notes. ‘The 2% of other products would be where the focus was to link batches. The task was made slightly easier as Dstl had access to the bottle disguised as perfume containing a relatively large quantity of Novichok. With the sensitive assays at their disposal the Dstl scientists would have been able to identify practically everything else in the Novichok container giving a roadmap for what to look for in wipe samples collected at the Skripal’s house. The wipe samples must have contained sufficient material (after separation and concentration of the 2% of other products) to identify these with the contents of the bottle that killed Dawn.’
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