English City, Stunned, Tries to Make Sense of New Poisonings

SALISBURY, England — Charlie Rowley may have been down on his luck, in and out of treatment for drug addiction, but he had a certain prowess as a “skip diver,” sorting through trash for the valuables his better-off neighbors threw out. He would emerge with chandeliers, toasters, laptops and trinkets for Dawn Sturgess, his girlfriend.

“It’s like treasure hunting — you’d find jewelry, you’d find rings,” said Josh Harris, 28, a skip diver himself. “It was Charlie’s thing.”

And it was skip diving — what Americans would call dumpster diving — that Harris was thinking about Thursday morning, after Rowley, 45, and Sturgess, 44, had become the fourth and fifth victims in a string of poisonings with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent developed in the last years of the Soviet Union.

As five new sites in Salisbury were sealed off by safety personnel, this stunned city was swept into a bizarre guessing game: How in the world could Sturgess and Rowley, a couple known, as one neighbor put it, as part of the “sitting-on-the-bench-drinking community,” have come in contact with Novichok, a top-secret weapon known to have been used only once?

The mystery has captured the attention of much of the country. In the days after March 4, when Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter were poisoned, British officials declared confidently that Russia was at fault, but tight-lipped investigators have shared little of the evidence they have gathered. A police officer investigating the Skripals' poisoning was also hospitalized for exposure to the agent. The poisoning of two more people, apparently by accident, may provide a new data point about how the assassin worked.

A fuller picture emerged Thursday of the two victims, who are in critical condition. Sturgess lived at the John Baker House, a supported-living center that houses people struggling with addiction. Peter Cook, 58, described her as “Dawnie,” a motherly figure who drank several bottles of wine a day, but typically stayed away from hard drugs. Rowley, according to The Salisbury Journal, was jailed for possession of heroin in 2015.

Harris, a mechanic who also lives in the John Baker House, has watched for days as the police pored through Sturgess’ possessions. A trash bin had been sealed off. So had Rowley’s apartment. So had a beloved riverside park, known here as “Lizzy Gardens.”

“They’re looking for something, I don’t know what,” Harris said.

One of the other residents, Kyesha Guest, 29, thought the same thing. “If Charlie had been skip diving, and touched it, rummaging through the rubbish, and then touched Dawn, maybe that’s what happened,” she ventured. “I don’t think they would have picked up something if they didn’t know what it was.”

The unexpected poisonings have revived tension between Britain and Russia, which the British have blamed for the attack. Russia on Thursday denied any involvement in the poisoning of the couple, as it did in the case of the Skripals, and suggested alternative theories, including one that says the British could have planted the nerve agent. Sergei Zheleznyak, deputy speaker of the lower house of Parliament, said that the British authorities might have concocted the case to sully Russia’s image while the country was hosting the World Cup soccer tournament.

“A huge number of British fans, despite the warnings from their government, came to support their team,” Zheleznyak told state television. “Their impressions are just destroying everything British propaganda built over the past few years. To break up this flow of really positive emotions that the British fans are sharing, they had to put something like this in the mass media.”

Investigators have been scrutinizing the actions of Rowley and Sturgess during the hours before they collapsed. Sturgess became sick first, around 10:15 a.m. Saturday, going into convulsions in the bathroom and foaming at the mouth. Nearly five hours passed before Rowley went into a zombielike state, his pupils shrunk to pinpoints, rocking back and forth and sweating profusely, a witness said.

Chemical weapons experts tried to piece the events together.

“The latest victims, did they come into contact with objects the would-be killer left behind?” asked Andrew C. Weber, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs. “I think that’s the most plausible.”

Richard Guthrie, the coordinating editor of CBW Events, a website on chemical and biological weapons, said he would “put it in the 90-percent-plus likelihood that this was a discarded item,” like a coat with a container of the nerve agent in the pocket.

“You would want to dispose of the coat, of the gloves,” he said. “If it was good tradecraft, that would have been disposed of in a place that people wouldn’t think of it being disposed.” The couple might well have picked it up, spotting “a nice-looking jacket bundled up.”

Dan Kaszeta, a former chemical and biological weapons adviser to the White House and the Secret Service, considered the possibility that the couple had found a container, like an ampul or a syringe, that had been used to transport the nerve agent to Salisbury.

“Were the guys who did this given more than they needed?” Kaszeta said. If so, “depending on how clean or sloppy they were,” the object might be a crucial piece of evidence.

“God knows, the container may even have fingerprints on it, it’s a smoking gun,” he said. “But killers sometimes leave a smoking gun at the scene of a crime.” Becca Stewart, 20, who lives in a modest apartment beside Rowley’s, said she had been instructed “not to go anywhere near the front door” of his apartment, but had been told little about the risk to her or her unborn baby, due in November. Transport vans could be seen coming and going, possibly carrying evidence from inside the house, and work crews erected high corrugated-steel barricades around the apartment.

“Now it’s on my doorstep,” Stewart said of the nerve agent, which she has been hurriedly researching on the internet. “They could have touched anything, like the door handle.”

Another area cordoned off was Queen Elizabeth Gardens, a lush park along the Avon riverbank that is, on most summer evenings, crowded with children and adults. Rowley and Sturgess had apparently spent time in the park before returning to his home and falling ill. James Weekes, 78, stood in the parking lot, gazing at the playground where his grandchildren usually play.

“I’m nearly 80 years old, I’ve had a life, but I’d be more worried about the kids,” said Weekes, a retired printer. “Until they find out what the level of Novichok is, how far it’s going to spread, I wouldn’t want my kids coming out here.” He surveyed the sprawling park, puzzling over the question of whether a trained assassin would dispose of evidence there.

“I can’t understand why that person would aimlessly throw an ampul in the grass,” he said “I imagine they’d use professionals. I’m sure they wouldn’t use a dimbo. Would they?”