A DOCTOR among the first people to notice and aid the Skripals when they were found slumped on a bench gave evidence at the Inquiry.
On Tuesday, October 29, Ms Helen Ord, at the time a paediatric registrar, was walking back to Sainsbury's car park with her partner, Chris, after going shopping.
It was at this stage they saw two people on a bench who were later identified as Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
She said: "I instantly thought they weren’t well. What I found particularly odd, which is what made me notice them, is the positioning of the two of them."
The male was staring into space, moving his mouth but not talking to anybody.
Ms Ord couldn't see his face initially but it struck her as “odd” and the lady next to him was in a “very odd position”. She continued to walk and said to her partner “they don’t look very well”.
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She described how the female’s body was “hooked” around the bench and she appeared to be fitting - having a tonic clonic seizure.
The lady was very “pale and waxy” and the male was “mumbling” and words were “foreign”
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A military nurse (now identified as Alison McCourt) and her husband were next to stop and help.
“It was very unusual for two people to be unwell at exactly the same moment, which was clearly what was happening”, Ms Ord said.
Ms Ord says it took 30 minutes for the ambulance to arrive.
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“It felt like a long time for the ambulance to arrive, it was about 30 minutes in total. The lady was continuing to fit and I was very worried she was going to arrest”
Later that evening, Ms Ord was contacted by a police officer - asking how she was.
He advised that she was to throw her clothes away, telling her the pair had been poisoned with Fentanyl.
She said: "I thought this strange due to the reaction with Narcan. I did not know Fentanyl was a recreational drug, it fits with his pupils being constricted, but Narcan would have worked if it was Fentanyl. I also thought it strange that he would tell me to throw away my clothes if they thought it was Fentanyl."
She told the Inquiry that Fentanyl is 'not a dangerous drug to touch'.
Ms Ord added: “Prior to me understanding what had happened the only things I could categorically say was that it was an extremely bizarre incident that I had never seen anything like before, that my suspicion was that it had been a poisoning of some description whether that was an intentional take of something or not, I would have no idea."
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