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Novichok show trial suffers sudden death shot from doctor’s testimony that government officials sedated the Skripals to stop them talking
By John Helmer (Posted Nov 04, 2024)
Originally published: Dances with Bears on November 1, 2024 (more by Dances with Bears)
Health, Human Rights, Inequality, StrategyBritain, Europe, RussiaNewswireBritish Government, Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, Dr Stephen Cockroft, Salisbury District Hospital, Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal
The British Government was exposed in the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry this week as keeping Sergei and Yulia Skripal (lead image) unconscious to silence them. That was six years ago, when they were in Salisbury District Hospital in March 2018. Now, prevented from testifying in public at the public inquiry under way in London, they are still incommunicado, either in prison or dead.
The evidence revealed in the published witness statements and transcript of testimony in four days of hearings at the Sturgess Inquiry October 28-31 shows that British Government officials have lied in public and lied on oath in the courts to conceal what they have been doing to accuse Russia of Novichok poisonings in the Salisbury area in 2018. The Inquiry records show that the chairman and judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), and the lawyers working for him are actively working to protect the lies and prevent contradicting evidence from becoming public.
Surprise testimony by Dr Stephen Cockroft, the doctor who cared for Sergei and Yulia Skripal on their admission to Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) on March 4, 2018, has revealed that the British Government kept them heavily sedated in order to tell the courts and media that they were unconscious and unresponsive when they had revived. Government officials ordered the hospital to punish Cockroft from talking directly to Yulia Skripal when she came out of her coma on March 8, 2018.
Testifying Skripal doctors at Salisbury District Hospital, left to right, Stephen Cockroft (photograph published at https://x.com/); James Haslam; Paul Russell. Cockroft left Salisbury Hospital in 2020 for a new appointment in the same area.
British Government agents controlling disclosure of the medical evidence, left to right, Christine Blanshard of SDH, Mark Urban, BBC reporter and MI6 informant; Lord Anthony Hughes. For Urban’s record of involvement with MI6, Sergei Skripal, and the Bellingcat propaganda unit, read this. Urban has refused to answer press questions.
Cockroft has been recorded as giving the police a 7-page witness statement dated March 19, 2018, of his direct observations as the doctor in charge at the Intensive Care Unit of SDH on March 8, less than four days after the admission of Sergei and Yulia Skripal:
I had not realised that this was a sedation hold [sedation stopped]. I felt shocked and a degree of Euphoria that she has woke [sic] up. Yulia nodded her head on occasions throughout the conversation, I would describe it as slow, not a normal nod in terms of the movement, nonetheless it was a very purposeful nod… I think Anna and Rebecca [ICU nurses on duty at Radnor Ward] were shook up that the patient waked [sic] quite as quickly as she did… I was staggered to see Yulia with her eyes open and apparently responding in a meaningful way. Yulia was looking at Anna in a purposeful way, her eyes were wide open, her gaze was directed towards Anna in a way that suggested to me that she had good vision to perceive that Anna was the person that was talking to her. It wasn’t a response we would see from someone with brain damage There were a couple of occasions when she shook her head from side to side again this was quite slowly, but purposefully. You would need a high degree for neurological function in order to do that. I also asked Yulia if she could squeeze my fingers on her left and the right and she did. She is the one [compared with Sergei Skripal], if I thought there was going to be some real long lasting damage it would be to her and there she was apparently awake.
Cockroft’s evidence of March 8, 2018, directly contradicts the evidence given on oath in the High Court in London on March 20-22, 2018, by state officials and an SDH “treating consultant”—the name was kept secret in the published court report–that “Mr Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Ms Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Mr Skripal is unable to communicate in any way. Ms Skripal is unable to communicate in any meaningful way.” The High Court record can be read in full here.
To read the judgement of Justice David Williams, click on link to enlarge: https://www.bailii.org
Read more: https://johnhelmer.net/
Cockroft’s disclosures also contradict the script which Yulia Skripal read out at a MI6-supervised and Reuters-filmed appearance for two minutes at a U.S. bomber base in the UK in May of 2018. Skripal claimed then “after 20 days in a coma I woke to the news that we had both been poisoned.” In fact, Yulia woke from her coma after four (4) days.
On July 18, 2024, Cockroft told the Inquiry which questioned him for a second witness statement: “An untoward event took place on Thursday 8 March 2018. A colleague (Dr James Haslam) had ordered all sedation to be discontinued temporarily to Yulia Skripal. This is quite a common practice on Intensive Care Units (ICU) and we refer to it as a ‘sedation hold’ and would normally be planned and discussed with the team. Unfortunately, having ordered the sedation hold, Dr Haslam left the ICU without advising me. I was present on the ICU treating another patient. As a consequence, Yulia Skripal regained consciousness very quickly and was confused, frightened, trying to get out of bed and was pulling at her various vascular access lines and breathing tube.
Cockroft then revealed that because the sedation had been stopped and Yulia was no longer comatose, Cockroft was punished by Blanshard, the hospital’s chief doctor.
I tried to feedback my concerns to Dr Haslam, but he was of the opinion that nothing untoward had occurred, but when these events were reported back to the Medical Director (Christine Blanshard) she had a very different opinion and I was summoned to a meeting with her on Monday 12 March to discuss my management of the incident. There is no formal record of that meeting [sic], however I was suspended from working on the ICU with immediate effect until Yulia and Sergei had either been discharged or died. Apparently by having had a conversation with Yulia Skripal I had been unprofessional and should have left such a conversation to the security services. I was warned by Dr Blanshard that I should not discuss any aspect of the poisonings with colleagues or other individuals and advised that any such discussion would be treated as serious misconduct. As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.
The Salisbury hospital official who collaborated with government officials and police to conceal the condition of the Skripals in hospital; to threaten and sanction the medical staff; and to intervene in the treatment of the Skripals, was the SDH medical director, Dr Christine Blanshard. By enforcing sedation on the two patients for the government’s political purpose, without their consent when they were conscious, out of coma, and capable of communicating, Blanshard violated her Hippocratic Oath.
Blanshard has not been called to testify to the Inquiry.
Blanshard and another of the SDH doctors, Dr Stephen Jukes, misled the BBC documentary broadcast on May 30, 2018. The two doctors acknowledged that the Skripals had recovered “at such a pace” but concealed how fast this had been–four days–and how they had then ordered heavy sedation to simulate coma and cover up. This is repeating a lie by BBC reporter Mark Urban in this, the first documentary of the Novichok narrative by the state propaganda organ. “After a couple of weeks,” Urban said in the film, counting from March 4 and March 18, “there were gradual but distinct signs of progress. The exact timing of that and details of the drugs given remains matters of medical confidentiality.”—minute 8:20. Urban has been revealed—and was recognized earlier by Sergei Skripal—to have been an informant for MI6.
Stephen Haslam was the second doctor with Cockroft in treatment of the Skripals in the ICU unit known at the hospital as the Radnor Ward. Haslam’s witness statement to police on July 9, 2018—two days after Dawn Sturgess’s officially recorded death–conceals that Yulia Skripal had recovered consciousness as soon as the sedation was removed four days after her admission to SDH. Haslam also conceals what Cockroft’s March 8 record shows—that Yulia Skripal could breathe and speak without the tracheostomic intubation visible later (right).
Instead, Haslam now claims to the Hughes Inquiry that while under sedation the two Skripals were subject to a tracheostomy on March 21; this, Haslam says, was maintained for a week for Yulia until March 28; for Sergei until April 5. Haslam provides no medical reason for this procedure.
The timing of the tracheostomy was during the High Court hearing on their purported incapacity to speak or express their consent to medical procedures. The timing also was just before technicians from the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrived from The Netherlands to take blood samples from the Skripals. The state-ordered sedation and tracheostomy prevented the Skripals from talking to the OPCW. For more details of the OPCW fix by the British to report Novichok, read the book (right).
Haslam also reveals in this statement that the 33-year old, previously healthy Yulia Skripal was suffering medical symptoms on her admission to the hospital which were more life-threatening than the condition recorded for her 66 year-old diabetic father, Sergei. “Overall, the clinical picture was one of profound compromise of the central and peripheral nervous systems,” Haslam testified, comparing daughter with father,
and her condition was worse than that of her father.
Medical experts who have reviewed the case and patient details and the Inquiry testimony, express surprise that the younger, healthier patient had suffered collapse simultaneously with the much older, health-compromised patient if, as the British Government alleges, they had both been contaminated two and a half hours earlier at the front door-handle of their home.
A leading British specialist on organophosphate poisoning comments:
[It is] somewhat amazing that both Skripals throw up at the same time, then collapse at the same time. Throw up because they were both in contact with a Novichok door handle some 2 1/2 hours earlier. Everything [in the Inquiry hearing] today seemed to be drawn into confirming the official narrative. We get right up to the collapse at the bench, but up to that point there are no symptoms from the older diabetic man. Not much use if the world’s most dangerous chemical cannot prevent an older, diabetic, overweight chap from driving, drinking, eating, walking, then collapsing some 2 1/2 hours later after the door-handle attack.
When I discuss the Skripal saga with my forensic colleagues, they all agree on the fantasy and fabrication. However, they have professional image to consider, so their heads are not above the parapet.
The sources believe the only likely explanation for simultaneous collapse on a bench in Salisbury city centre, and the contrastive condition of Yulia and Sergei, is that they were attacked by a poison spray at the bench itself, and that Yulia was hit by a larger aerosol dose than struck Sergei.
The CCTV recordings, contemporary witnesses, and British police evidence at the Inquiry confirm there were no Russian agents at the scene at the time.
To prevent the Skripals from communicating from the hospital with the Russian Embassy in London and their families in Russia, the Government had arranged for doctors, experts, and lawyers to lie in the High Court at a hearing on their condition on March 20-22, 2018. That their testimony has now been exposed by Cockroft at the Inquiry to have been false was put to Vikram Sachdeva KC, by email yesterday; Sachdeva was the lawyer appointed by the Government to represent the Skripals in the High Court proceeding.
The British media and state propaganda organs have failed to recognize that when Cockroft’s witness statements and oral testimony were revealed on Thursday, the official narrative of a Russian Novichok plot collapsed. The BBC report omitted entirely what Cockroft had revealed about Yulia Skripal’s recovery after four days.
The British alternative media have done no better than the mainstream media. George Galloway a well-known alt-media podcaster, has failed to report at all.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
+++
Sources & Links
About John Helmer
John Helmer is the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. He first set up his bureau in 1989, making him today the doyen of the foreign press corps in Russia.
British Government Dawn Sturgess Inquiry Dr Stephen Cockroft Salisbury District Hospital Sergei Skripal Yulia Skripal
A world where our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like: The Forty-Fourth Newsletter (2024)
UNICEF: ‘Israel’ massacred over 50 children in Jabalia in 2 days
+++
https://mronline.org/2024/11/04/novichok-show-trial-suffers-sudden-death-shot/
Novichok show trial suffers sudden death shot from doctor’s testimony that government officials sedated the Skripals to stop them talking
By John Helmer (Posted Nov 04, 2024)
Originally published: Dances with Bears on November 1, 2024 (more by Dances with Bears)
Health, Human Rights, Inequality, StrategyBritain, Europe, RussiaNewswireBritish Government, Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, Dr Stephen Cockroft, Salisbury District Hospital, Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal
The British Government was exposed in the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry this week as keeping Sergei and Yulia Skripal (lead image) unconscious to silence them. That was six years ago, when they were in Salisbury District Hospital in March 2018. Now, prevented from testifying in public at the public inquiry under way in London, they are still incommunicado, either in prison or dead.
The evidence revealed in the published witness statements and transcript of testimony in four days of hearings at the Sturgess Inquiry October 28-31 shows that British Government officials have lied in public and lied on oath in the courts to conceal what they have been doing to accuse Russia of Novichok poisonings in the Salisbury area in 2018. The Inquiry records show that the chairman and judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), and the lawyers working for him are actively working to protect the lies and prevent contradicting evidence from becoming public.
Surprise testimony by Dr Stephen Cockroft, the doctor who cared for Sergei and Yulia Skripal on their admission to Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) on March 4, 2018, has revealed that the British Government kept them heavily sedated in order to tell the courts and media that they were unconscious and unresponsive when they had revived. Government officials ordered the hospital to punish Cockroft from talking directly to Yulia Skripal when she came out of her coma on March 8, 2018.
Testifying Skripal doctors at Salisbury District Hospital, left to right, Stephen Cockroft (photograph published at https://x.com/); James Haslam; Paul Russell. Cockroft left Salisbury Hospital in 2020 for a new appointment in the same area.
British Government agents controlling disclosure of the medical evidence, left to right, Christine Blanshard of SDH, Mark Urban, BBC reporter and MI6 informant; Lord Anthony Hughes. For Urban’s record of involvement with MI6, Sergei Skripal, and the Bellingcat propaganda unit, read this. Urban has refused to answer press questions.
Cockroft has been recorded as giving the police a 7-page witness statement dated March 19, 2018, of his direct observations as the doctor in charge at the Intensive Care Unit of SDH on March 8, less than four days after the admission of Sergei and Yulia Skripal:
I had not realised that this was a sedation hold [sedation stopped]. I felt shocked and a degree of Euphoria that she has woke [sic] up. Yulia nodded her head on occasions throughout the conversation, I would describe it as slow, not a normal nod in terms of the movement, nonetheless it was a very purposeful nod… I think Anna and Rebecca [ICU nurses on duty at Radnor Ward] were shook up that the patient waked [sic] quite as quickly as she did… I was staggered to see Yulia with her eyes open and apparently responding in a meaningful way. Yulia was looking at Anna in a purposeful way, her eyes were wide open, her gaze was directed towards Anna in a way that suggested to me that she had good vision to perceive that Anna was the person that was talking to her. It wasn’t a response we would see from someone with brain damage There were a couple of occasions when she shook her head from side to side again this was quite slowly, but purposefully. You would need a high degree for neurological function in order to do that. I also asked Yulia if she could squeeze my fingers on her left and the right and she did. She is the one [compared with Sergei Skripal], if I thought there was going to be some real long lasting damage it would be to her and there she was apparently awake.
Cockroft’s evidence of March 8, 2018, directly contradicts the evidence given on oath in the High Court in London on March 20-22, 2018, by state officials and an SDH “treating consultant”—the name was kept secret in the published court report–that “Mr Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Ms Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Mr Skripal is unable to communicate in any way. Ms Skripal is unable to communicate in any meaningful way.” The High Court record can be read in full here.
To read the judgement of Justice David Williams, click on link to enlarge: https://www.bailii.org
Read more: https://johnhelmer.net/
Cockroft’s disclosures also contradict the script which Yulia Skripal read out at a MI6-supervised and Reuters-filmed appearance for two minutes at a U.S. bomber base in the UK in May of 2018. Skripal claimed then “after 20 days in a coma I woke to the news that we had both been poisoned.” In fact, Yulia woke from her coma after four (4) days.
On July 18, 2024, Cockroft told the Inquiry which questioned him for a second witness statement: “An untoward event took place on Thursday 8 March 2018. A colleague (Dr James Haslam) had ordered all sedation to be discontinued temporarily to Yulia Skripal. This is quite a common practice on Intensive Care Units (ICU) and we refer to it as a ‘sedation hold’ and would normally be planned and discussed with the team. Unfortunately, having ordered the sedation hold, Dr Haslam left the ICU without advising me. I was present on the ICU treating another patient. As a consequence, Yulia Skripal regained consciousness very quickly and was confused, frightened, trying to get out of bed and was pulling at her various vascular access lines and breathing tube.
Cockroft then revealed that because the sedation had been stopped and Yulia was no longer comatose, Cockroft was punished by Blanshard, the hospital’s chief doctor.
I tried to feedback my concerns to Dr Haslam, but he was of the opinion that nothing untoward had occurred, but when these events were reported back to the Medical Director (Christine Blanshard) she had a very different opinion and I was summoned to a meeting with her on Monday 12 March to discuss my management of the incident. There is no formal record of that meeting [sic], however I was suspended from working on the ICU with immediate effect until Yulia and Sergei had either been discharged or died. Apparently by having had a conversation with Yulia Skripal I had been unprofessional and should have left such a conversation to the security services. I was warned by Dr Blanshard that I should not discuss any aspect of the poisonings with colleagues or other individuals and advised that any such discussion would be treated as serious misconduct. As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.
The Salisbury hospital official who collaborated with government officials and police to conceal the condition of the Skripals in hospital; to threaten and sanction the medical staff; and to intervene in the treatment of the Skripals, was the SDH medical director, Dr Christine Blanshard. By enforcing sedation on the two patients for the government’s political purpose, without their consent when they were conscious, out of coma, and capable of communicating, Blanshard violated her Hippocratic Oath.
Blanshard has not been called to testify to the Inquiry.
Blanshard and another of the SDH doctors, Dr Stephen Jukes, misled the BBC documentary broadcast on May 30, 2018. The two doctors acknowledged that the Skripals had recovered “at such a pace” but concealed how fast this had been–four days–and how they had then ordered heavy sedation to simulate coma and cover up. This is repeating a lie by BBC reporter Mark Urban in this, the first documentary of the Novichok narrative by the state propaganda organ. “After a couple of weeks,” Urban said in the film, counting from March 4 and March 18, “there were gradual but distinct signs of progress. The exact timing of that and details of the drugs given remains matters of medical confidentiality.”—minute 8:20. Urban has been revealed—and was recognized earlier by Sergei Skripal—to have been an informant for MI6.
Stephen Haslam was the second doctor with Cockroft in treatment of the Skripals in the ICU unit known at the hospital as the Radnor Ward. Haslam’s witness statement to police on July 9, 2018—two days after Dawn Sturgess’s officially recorded death–conceals that Yulia Skripal had recovered consciousness as soon as the sedation was removed four days after her admission to SDH. Haslam also conceals what Cockroft’s March 8 record shows—that Yulia Skripal could breathe and speak without the tracheostomic intubation visible later (right).
Instead, Haslam now claims to the Hughes Inquiry that while under sedation the two Skripals were subject to a tracheostomy on March 21; this, Haslam says, was maintained for a week for Yulia until March 28; for Sergei until April 5. Haslam provides no medical reason for this procedure.
The timing of the tracheostomy was during the High Court hearing on their purported incapacity to speak or express their consent to medical procedures. The timing also was just before technicians from the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrived from The Netherlands to take blood samples from the Skripals. The state-ordered sedation and tracheostomy prevented the Skripals from talking to the OPCW. For more details of the OPCW fix by the British to report Novichok, read the book (right).
Haslam also reveals in this statement that the 33-year old, previously healthy Yulia Skripal was suffering medical symptoms on her admission to the hospital which were more life-threatening than the condition recorded for her 66 year-old diabetic father, Sergei. “Overall, the clinical picture was one of profound compromise of the central and peripheral nervous systems,” Haslam testified, comparing daughter with father,
and her condition was worse than that of her father.
Medical experts who have reviewed the case and patient details and the Inquiry testimony, express surprise that the younger, healthier patient had suffered collapse simultaneously with the much older, health-compromised patient if, as the British Government alleges, they had both been contaminated two and a half hours earlier at the front door-handle of their home.
A leading British specialist on organophosphate poisoning comments:
[It is] somewhat amazing that both Skripals throw up at the same time, then collapse at the same time. Throw up because they were both in contact with a Novichok door handle some 2 1/2 hours earlier. Everything [in the Inquiry hearing] today seemed to be drawn into confirming the official narrative. We get right up to the collapse at the bench, but up to that point there are no symptoms from the older diabetic man. Not much use if the world’s most dangerous chemical cannot prevent an older, diabetic, overweight chap from driving, drinking, eating, walking, then collapsing some 2 1/2 hours later after the door-handle attack.
When I discuss the Skripal saga with my forensic colleagues, they all agree on the fantasy and fabrication. However, they have professional image to consider, so their heads are not above the parapet.
The sources believe the only likely explanation for simultaneous collapse on a bench in Salisbury city centre, and the contrastive condition of Yulia and Sergei, is that they were attacked by a poison spray at the bench itself, and that Yulia was hit by a larger aerosol dose than struck Sergei.
The CCTV recordings, contemporary witnesses, and British police evidence at the Inquiry confirm there were no Russian agents at the scene at the time.
To prevent the Skripals from communicating from the hospital with the Russian Embassy in London and their families in Russia, the Government had arranged for doctors, experts, and lawyers to lie in the High Court at a hearing on their condition on March 20-22, 2018. That their testimony has now been exposed by Cockroft at the Inquiry to have been false was put to Vikram Sachdeva KC, by email yesterday; Sachdeva was the lawyer appointed by the Government to represent the Skripals in the High Court proceeding.
The British media and state propaganda organs have failed to recognize that when Cockroft’s witness statements and oral testimony were revealed on Thursday, the official narrative of a Russian Novichok plot collapsed. The BBC report omitted entirely what Cockroft had revealed about Yulia Skripal’s recovery after four days.
The British alternative media have done no better than the mainstream media. George Galloway a well-known alt-media podcaster, has failed to report at all.
Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
+++
Sources & Links
About John Helmer
John Helmer is the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. He first set up his bureau in 1989, making him today the doyen of the foreign press corps in Russia.
British Government Dawn Sturgess Inquiry Dr Stephen Cockroft Salisbury District Hospital Sergei Skripal Yulia Skripal
A world where our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like: The Forty-Fourth Newsletter (2024)
UNICEF: ‘Israel’ massacred over 50 children in Jabalia in 2 days
+++
https://mronline.org/2024/11/04/novichok-show-trial-suffers-sudden-death-shot/