Britain Vows Retaliation if Russia Poisoned Former Spy

LONDON — Calling Russia “a malign force around the world,” Britain’s foreign secretary on Tuesday vowed retaliation if investigators find that Moscow is behind the apparent poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter in southern England.

The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, cautioned that it was still not clear who, if anyone, was responsible. But, speaking in the House of Commons, he noted the widespread speculation that Russia was to blame and “the echoes of the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.” Litvinenko, another former Russian agent, was fatally poisoned in London, and a British investigation concluded that he had been killed on orders from the Kremlin.

“Should evidence emerge that implies state responsibility, then Her Majesty’s government will respond appropriately and robustly,” said Johnson, who confirmed the identities of the victims, Sergei V. Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, 33. “Though I am not now pointing fingers, I say to governments around the world that no attempt to take innocent life on U.K. soil will go unsanctioned and unpunished.”

Skripal and his daughter, who took ill on Sunday, were in critical condition after being found on a bench in Salisbury, about 85 miles southwest of London. The police said they had suffered “exposure to an unknown substance.”

With its echoes of stranger-than-fiction plots from the Cold War and from the Putin era, the case threatens to worsen the already tense relations between the West and a Russian government that has annexed part of Ukraine and propped up the Assad government in Syria and that stands accused of disrupting elections and sowing discord within democracies.

“This is a form of soft war that Russia is now waging against the West,” said Tom Tugendhat, a lawmaker who is chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the British Parliament.

Tugendhat said that Britain should consider revoking the broadcast license of RT, the Kremlin-funded channel formerly called Russia Today. “I see absolutely no reason why we should allow information warfare to be carried out on UK soil by hostile agents,” he said.

Britain’s top counterterrorism official, Mark Rowley, said on Tuesday that his forces had joined the investigation and could take over the case, depending on what evidence emerges.

“The specialist resources that sit with the counterterrorism network that I coordinate across the country and other partners are working with Wiltshire police to get the bottom of it,” Rowley, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, told BBC radio. “We’re speaking to witnesses, we’re taking forensic samples at the scene, we’re doing toxicology work.”

Police specialists wearing hazardous material suits erected a tent over the bench and cordoned off part of the shopping district where the two had been taken ill, including an Italian restaurant and a pub, while officers from multiple law enforcement agencies combed the area for evidence.

Responding to reports that some officers had received medical treatment after working at the scene, the police in Wiltshire, the county that includes Salisbury, released a statement on Tuesday confirming that, “a small number of emergency services personnel were assessed immediately after the incident and all but one have been released from hospital.”

In 2006, Sergei Skripal, a former officer for Russian military intelligence, was convicted in a Russian court of being a double agent — while working for Russia, he was secretly passing classified information to British intelligence. In 2010, he was released from prison and sent to Britain as part of a spy exchange with Western agencies.

In Moscow, the government said it had no information about the apparent poisoning or about Skripal’s activities in Britain. Dmitry S. Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said that Russia had not received any requests for cooperation in the investigation but that it was always open to such requests, the Interfax news agency reported.

Accusations of Kremlin involvement “weren’t long in coming,” Peskov said. “You know how he ended up in the West, what actions and decisions led him there.”

Rowley, the counterterrorism official, was asked about parallels to the death of Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who was poisoned with polonium, a radioactive element — a death that the British investigation later said was probably approved by Putin — and about reports that a number of people at odds with the Russian government had died in Britain under murky circumstances.

“There are deaths which attract attention,” Rowley said. “I think we have to remember that Russian exiles aren’t immortal. They do all die, and there can be a tendency for some conspiracy theories. But likewise, we have to be alive to the fact of state threats, as illustrated by the Litvinenko case.” James Puttock, a 47-year-old scaffolder, lives a few doors from Skripal in Salisbury, on a quiet residential street of semidetached two-story houses, with small lawns outside.

“He was just an ordinary person,” Puttock said, “I didn’t think he was” a Russian spy. “How do you even know?” he added. “Do I look like a Russian spy?”

On Sunday afternoon, a security camera at a fitness club captured images of a man and woman, reportedly the Skripals, walking through the shopping area in Salisbury known as the Maltings. The video was time-stamped 3:47 p.m., less than half an hour before the pair were found at 4:15 p.m., incapacitated, on a bench nearby.

The police said that the man and woman had no visible injuries. “At this stage, it is not yet clear if a crime has been committed,” they said in a Twitter post.

The BBC quoted a witness who said that the woman appeared to have passed out, while the man seemed seriously impaired, “doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky.” The police said the victims had been unconscious.

When Skripal, who once held the rank of colonel, was arrested, the Russian Federal Security Service said that he started spying for Britain in 1995, when he was stationed overseas, and continued to do so after retiring from the military in 1999.