ON the final day of open hearings at the Dawn Sturgess Public Inquiry, a statement read on behalf of Dawn Sturgess' family asked why precautionary measures to protect the Skripals had not been implemented.
Speaking on behalf of Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess' family, Mr Michael Mansfield asked: "Why were no obvious, proportionate and basic measures taken to protect the Skripals and hence the wider public?"
Sergei Skripal lived on Christie Miller Road, a cul de sac just off Devizes Road in Salisbury, without any security measures such as cameras or security at his door.
In 2004, Sergei was arrested by the Russian FSB and in 2006 convicted and sentenced to 13 years’ 8 imprisonment for espionage. It was said that he had been working for the British intelligence services, and had betrayed Russian agents in Britain and the USA.
In 2010, he was exchanged in a ‘spy swap’ for a number of Russian sleeper agents who had been exposed and were being held in custody in the US. Mr Skripal came to the UK for protection.
There are a number of reports that Mr Skripal continued to work for security or intelligence services in the UK and abroad, providing sensitive information about the GRU.
Mr Putin described Mr Skripal as “A traitor to his motherland”. The president has a track record of assassination, or of botched assassination, of those it considers traitors, the inquiry heard.
Examples are the poisoning by Polonium of Alexander Litvinenko, and the poisoning by Novichok of Alexei Navalny.
Mr Mansfield said that the risk of a target on Sergei was "manifestly obvious", adding "you don't have to be working in specialist areas of departments , or even, as they say sometimes, a rocket scientist to work this one out."
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Continuing with the question of why security measures had not been implemented to keep the Skripals and the wider public safe, Mr Mansfield said: "There is a duty to the public here for there to be a proper explanation in public of how such failure has nearly led to catastrophic sequences.
"A major disaster averted but not by the authorities, but by good fortune and good work by a lot of people who had come in and work it out at a rather later stage.
"You've got a double agent sitting in Salisbury who is Russian who has undoubtedly been in a very high position with information of this kind, that the Russians are just going to ignore what's going on and of course, we say, for reasons I will come to, he certainly went on and that's part of the problem.
He says that if it was thought to be too expensive "Well, the cost of human lives can't be measured in this way.
"I'm not going to belabour how many millions have been spent on the clear up and so on. This was a sum of money that could have been avoided if, some simple, obvious precautions had been put in place."
He says that if Sergei did not want any precautions "that's not enough" of a reason, because there was an "obligation to the United Kingdom public"
Mr Mansfield says that the public should be able to see the answer to the question when Lord Hughes publishes the report of the inquiry.
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