Britain charged two Russians in absentia on Wednesday with the attempted murder of a former Russian spy and his daughter, saying the suspects were military intelligence officers almost certainly acting on orders from high up in the Russian state.
British police revealed images of the two men they said had flown to Britain for a weekend in March to kill former spy Sergei Skripal with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent.
Mr. Skripal’s daughter Yulia and a police officer who attended the scene also fell ill in the case, which has caused the biggest East-West diplomatic expulsions since the Cold War.
British authorities identified the suspects as Russian nationals travelling on genuine passports under the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Prime Minister Theresa May said the government had concluded they were officers in Russia’s military intelligence service GRU.
Russia’s denial
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the names given by Britain did not mean anything to Moscow, which has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack.
The “remarkably sophisticated” attack appeared to be a clear assassination attempt, said Neil Basu, head of U.K. counterterrorism policing. He described an investigation which involved 250 detectives and analysis of some 11,000 hours of video.