The two people who were hospitalized in the UK town of Amesbury over the weekend had come into contact with a Novichok nerve agent, but had not been targets of an attack, UK Minister of State for Security Ben Wallace said.
“These people weren’t linked to the Skripals… It wasn’t an attack, it was, I think, a contamination by a Novichok,” Wallace said.
UK Security Minister Ben Wallace says he is sure that no matter how long it takes that “we will eventually find out who carried out the Novichok attack.”
“The Russian state could put this ‘wrong’ right, they could tell us what happened, what they did and fill in some of the significant gaps that we are trying to pursue … We have said previously and the prime minister has said [that] they can come to us and tell us what happened. I am waiting for the phone call from the Russian state,” Security Minister Ben Wallace told BBC radio.
The minister stressed that this was just one line of inquiry and that the police would be pursuing several others.
A local 44-year-old woman and a 45-year-old man were hospitalized after being found unwell on June 30 in Amesbury, just miles away from Salisbury.
UK authorities alleged that A234 nerve agent had been used to poison Former Russian GRU colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter, who collapsed in the UK town of Salisbury, not far from Amesbury, in March.
London blamed the poisoning of the Skripals on the Russian government, while Moscow has strongly refuted all the allegations.