Whitehall sources have claimed that the suspected poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal is being treated as a state-sponsored Russian assassination attempt.
Along with his daughter Yulia and a police officer who attended the scene in Salisbury where they were found, Skripal was taken to hospital critically ill after being exposed to a nerve agent. A former Colonel in Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye, or GRU), Skripal was recruited by Britain’s foreign intelligence agency the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, now MI6) in the 1990s. In 2006, he was arrested and prosecuted in Russia for “high treason”. …read more
Source: The Conversation