Sturgess’s family launched a judicial review, with their lawyers arguing it was “inconceivable” that Chepiga and Mishkin operated in “a bubble”, and claiming the operation must have been authorised by the Russian state – possibly right up to Putin. Ridley maintained Sturgess’s death was too remote from the attempted murder of Skripal to allow the scope of her inquest to widen to look at elements such as the possible role of Moscow.
They were allegedly the agents on the ground, working under the aliases Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov respectively, who carried out the attack on Skripal. The following year the senior Wiltshire and Swindon coroner, David Ridley, said as part of the inquest he would consider the actions of the Russians Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. Rowley recovered but Sturgess died on 8 July. In June 2018, Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother of three, and her partner, Charlie Rowley, were poisoned in Amesbury, eight miles north of Salisbury, after he found a fake perfume bottle containing novichok. He, his daughter, Yulia, and a police officer, DS Nick Bailey, were poisoned but survived. The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was the target of the initial novichok attack in Salisbury on 4 March 2018. Litvinenko was a former Russian spy who, according to a UK public inquiry, was probably murdered in London on the personal orders of Vladimir Putin.Ī pre-inquest review hearing will take place on 30 March where submissions will be heard by Hallett at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. It is understood a lawyer working alongside her will be Martin Smith, who is currently solicitor to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and was involved in the Alexander Litvinenko inquest. High court judges are occasionally assigned to particularly contentious inquests, notably Lord Justice Scott Baker, who conducted the Princess Diana inquest. Now a crossbench life peer, Hallett was a senior judge in the court of appeal and sat as a coroner at the inquests into the deaths of the 52 victims of the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
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