LONDON, September 21. /TASS/. The British Foreign Office summoned the Russian embassy's Minister Counsellor Ivan Volodin on Tuesday, an embassy spokesperson told TASS.
"Ivan Volodin has departed for the Foreign Office," the spokesperson said.
Reuters reported earlier, citing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spokesman, that the Foreign Office would raise the 2018 Salisbury poisoning incident with the Russian embassy later in the day.
London's Metropolitan Police Service said on Tuesday that a Russian national named Denis Sergeev, also known as Sergey Fedotov, had been charged "with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm, possession and use of a chemical weapon" in the Salisbury poisoning case. He is believed to have met with the two suspects in the case that were identified earlier.
Salisbury and Amesbury incidents
According to London, former Russian military intelligence (GRU) Colonel Sergei Skripal, who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Great Britain and later swapped for Russian intelligence officers, and his daughter Yulia suffered the effects of an alleged nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury on March 4, 2018. Claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a Novichok-class nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union, London rushed to accuse Russia of being involved in the incident. Moscow rejected all of the United Kingdom’s accusations. Chief Executive of the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down Gary Aitkenhead said later that British experts had been unable to identify the origin of the nerve agent used in the attack on the Skripals.
On June 30, 2018, 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess and 45-year-old Charles Rowley were hospitalized in critical condition in the British town of Amesbury. The Metropolitan Police went on to claim that the two had been exposed to Novichok, the same nerve agent that was allegedly used in the Skripal poisoning. After being mysteriously exposed to a nerve agent and falling into a coma, Sturgess died on July 8 and Rowley was discharged from the hospital on July 20. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said in a report on September 4 that Sturgess’ death was due to contact with the same chemical that had earlier affected the Skripals.
On September 5, 2018, then British Prime Minister Theresa May briefed parliament on the results of the investigation, saying that two Russians, who carried passports in the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov and allegedly were GRU agents, were suspected of the attempt on the Skripals’ lives. Petrov and Boshirov later dismissed the allegations in an interview with the RT TV channel.