Police hunt Novichok nerve agent source

Police yesterday raced to find the object that contaminated a couple with the Soviet-made Novichok nerve agent in southwestern England where a former Russian spy was poisoned with the same toxin four months ago.Dawn Sturgess, 44, and Charlie Rowley, 45, fell ill on Saturday in Amesbury, a small town near the city of Salisbury where Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed on March 4, spreading fear once again among locals.Police said they had established that the couple, who remain in a critical condition in hospital, were exposed to the nerve agent after “handling a contaminated item.” They also did not rule out the possibility of more people coming into contact with the poison, which they suspect may have been left over from the attempted murder on the Skripals, although police have yet to determine whether it was the same batch.“It is rather scary,” local resident Geoffrey, 66, said as he walked by the canal. “It is an agent, it is not a gun or a knife that you can find and dispose of.  It is something different, it could be on that bench...it makes me worried.”“It is terrible to think that it happened months ago, and now it starts all over again,” said 82-year-old Madeleine Webb.“It is the second time already, why not a third time? It’s not funny.”London blames Russia for the Skripal attack, with Interior Minister Sajid Javid on Thursday accusing Moscow of using Britain as a “dumping ground for poison”. Russia has strongly denied the accusation.“It is completely unacceptable for our people to be either deliberate or accidental targets, or for our streets, our parks, our towns to be dumping grounds for poison,” Javid told parliament.But Russia quickly hit back, denouncing Britain for playing “dirty political games”, trying to “muddy the waters” and “frighten its own citizens”.“We urge British law enforcement not to get involved in dirty political games,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.“This government and its representatives will have to apologise to Russia and the international community,” she said.The Skripal incident triggered a major diplomatic crisis, leading to Britain and its allies withdrawing diplomatic staff from Moscow and tit-for-tat expulsions by Russia.Novichok is a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. A government scientist told the BBC that the agent can be degraded by water and sunlight, meaning it was unlikely the contamination took place in the open, and said that it was so toxic that it could pass through the skin. Police declared a major incident on Wednesday after Sturgess and then Rowley collapsed on Saturday.