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The Salisbury Poisonings
A whole city in deadly danger
The Couple on the Bench
On Sunday, March 4, 2018, the weather is chilly and cloudy in the quiet cathedral city of Salisbury, in Wiltshire, southwest England. The city’s 40,000 residents don’t know it yet, but this day will change all of their lives.
At around 4.15 pm an older man and younger women are found slumped unconscious on a bench in the middle of a small open-air shopping precinct in the city centre called the Maltings. The woman was frothing at the mouth and, according to a bystander, her eyes “were wide open but completely white.” They were rushed by ambulance the 3.5 miles (about 5.5km)to the nearby Salisbury District Hospital.
The pair on the bench were Russian nationals Salisbury resident Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, who was visiting him from Moscow.
Sergei’s wife Liudmila had died of cancer aged 60 in 2012, a year after they had bought a semi-detached home in Salisbury. In July 2017, Sergei’s 43-year-old son Alexander, who lived with him, had died while on holiday with his girlfriend in St Petersburg, Russia after being rushed to hospital with liver failure. Both Liudmila and Alexander Skripal were buried at London Road Cemetery in Salisbury.
