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Anthony Hughes was in such a hurry to open and shut the British Government’s case against President Vladimir Putin for the Novichok chemical warfare attack in England in 2018, he failed to tie the top button of his shirt.
This was also a precaution against choking on what Hughes recited as his conclusions to more than seven years of investigations, five months of autopsy, toxicology, and post-mortem pathology, then just 24 days of public hearings, which he read from a prepared script on his desk. At the 21-minute mark, to the doctors, lawyers, policemen, intelligence agents, and “to the many people who made the vital administrative arrangements for the Inquiry to function at all,” Hughes looked down to read out “thank you very much”; shuffled the pages into a notebook, and left the room. No public or press questions were allowed.
It had taken a special kind of expertise for Hughes – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — to exclude the four crucial pieces of evidence which surfaced in the inquiry he has conducted since 2022 into the cause of Dawn Sturgess’s death. This is the evidence (1) that the alleged Russian Novichok weapon, a bottle of perfume, was planted by British government agents in Sturgess’s kitchen twelve days after police drug squad searches had failed to find it; (2) that the colour of the liquid in this bottle was yellow, according to an expert witness, when Novichok is colourless; (3) that the only witness to finding the perfume bottle and giving it to Sturgess, her boyfriend Charles Rowley, was so incapable of telling the truth he was excluded from testifying in public; and (4) that the expert pathologists who had conducted the post-mortem investigations between July and November 2018 had recorded enough fentanyl, cocaine and other drugs in Sturgess’s bloodstream to have been the cause of her heart and then brain death before Novichok was detected by the British chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.
Instead, Hughes has reported only the evidence to fit the British government’s version of a Russian attack with Novichok.
The judge did more. He reported that what he had been told of the Russian recovery of Crimea in March 2014 and the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 four months later was “the most likely analysis” of President Putin’s motivation for ordering the Novichok operation of 2018.
Hughes went further still.
“There are two more pieces of evidence,” he declared in last week’s report, “which may be relevant to the question of Russian state responsibility for the events into which I had to inquire. One concerns an incident near to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Netherlands. The other concerns Alexei Navalny. Both are examples of second-hand evidence, or hearsay, which can of course be reliable, but which I did not have the opportunity to explore in any detail… Neither of the two additional areas of evidence now summarised would be enough by themselves to justify the conclusions which I have reached here. But both may provide some limited additional support for those conclusions, at which I arrived without needing to call upon them, and I ought to refer to them both” [page 90].
This was Hughes sticking his neck well beyond his shirt collar: the official terms of reference limited him to investigating “how; when and where [Dawn Sturgess] came by her death; and the particulars (if any) required by the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 to be registered concerning the death; Identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death lies.”
The evidence of Russian military operations he accepted had come from “closed Inquiry hearings in January 2025,” Hughes said. “The hearings lasted several days. Attendance at the hearings was limited to myself, members of the Inquiry Team, and appropriate members of the teams for His Majesty’s Government (HMG) and Operation Verbasco. The hearings took place in a government building in London. During the closed hearings, as in the open hearings, I heard oral evidence from witnesses and also received submissions from Counsel regarding documentary evidence. A number of witnesses were called and questioned during the closed hearings. The witnesses included Commander Dominic Murphy (Commander of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15)), MK26 (Chemical and Biological Scientific Adviser, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Porton Down) and also witnesses represented by HMG. The HMG witnesses included individuals who had been personally involved in making decisions regarding Sergei Skripal’s security prior to March 2018” [page 121].
The last sentence identifies the MI6 or Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Together with the other UK government agencies, police, and officials engaged in the manufacture and testing of chemical warfare weapons, this was a conference to compose evidence made up to look like a cross-examination and interrogation, but kept secret to shut out doubt.
Hughes is a retired appeals court judge who was paid by the Home Office to take over the Sturgess investigation after two inquest coroners had been removed and the inquest itself replaced by a public inquiry. The government’s first reason for that was to allow untested evidence from the security and intelligence services to be given in secret that would be inadmissible in a regular coronial court inquest. The second reason was to frustrate a multi-million pound compensation claim which lawyers for the Sturgess family and boyfriend Rowley were making against the Home Office for negligence in protecting her from the Russian threat.
Hughes blocked this money shot on the second last page of his report. “I have considered whether there were steps that the British state ought to have taken to avoid the Salisbury and/or the Amesbury events. First… I do not think that the assessment that Sergei Skripal was not at significant risk of assassination by Russian personnel can be said to have been unreasonable, although, of course, events unhappily demonstrated that it was wrong… Nor, for the same reasons, do I consider that the attack on Sergei Skripal ought to have been avoided by the kind of additional security measures which I was asked to consider. The only such measures which could have avoided the attack would have been such as to hide him completely with an entirely new identity, and to prevent him and his family from having any continued contact. As at 2018, the risk was not so severe as to demand such far-reaching precautions” [page 125].
Here is how Hughes disposed of the evidence casting the greatest doubt on his conclusions.
The bottle of perfume was planted twelve days after Sturgess’ collapse and death, and after thorough police searches for evidence of illegal drugs – Hughes ignores the evidence.
Source: “The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry,” page 155-56.
In his report Hughes fails to explain why it took twelve days for the Wiltshire drug squad to find the bottle which was visible on the kitchen shelf, according to this police photograph:
Source: “The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry,” page 79.
“The source of their exposure must lie,” Hughes concluded, “with the bottle later found – when it was possible to make a safe search – in the Muggleton Road flat…The search process was painstaking and therefore protracted, given that it was plain from the condition of both Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley that there was a great risk of Novichok contamination and the nerve agent might be anywhere in the flat. Special arrangements had to be devised for handling items recovered without risk of contamination – this included the need for ‘Russian doll’ metal boxes for transport to Dstl [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Porton Down] for testing. The searchers found – in some rubbish in a plastic bag on the kitchen floor – what appeared to be an opened and empty small box for ‘Nina Ricci’ perfume. Later, as the search progressed, they found a small bottle sitting on the kitchen worktop to one side of the sink, and in amongst a clutter of glasses and other unconnected items. The bottle had a kind of push-down applicator attached to its top. The liquid inside was fairly viscous” [page 78].
Implied by Hughes here is that the delay in finding the bottle was caused by the time required for safety reasons. He omits the evidence presented in the open court hearings that there had been extensive and painstaking searches, first by the ambulance crews on the scene on June 30, then by the police who published their accounts at the time that they were looking for illegal drugs and injection paraphernalia, had found them, and warned the public of dealers attempting to sell more. No witness has been recorded in evidence from the South Western Ambulance Service or the Wiltshire county police to tell Hughes their searches were delayed at the house for hazardous material security reasons. Hughes invented this fiction.
The alternative explanation is that the delay in finding the alleged Novichok weapon was caused by the time required by the British government’s Porton Down laboratory to fabricate the bottle with its liquid contents and plant it at the scene. Hughes covered up by failing to investigate.
What colour was the liquid in the perfume bottle which Hughes accepted to have been the cause of Sturgess’ death?
A direct request to researchers publishing on A-234, the standard chemical designation for the Novichok class of nerve agents, has revealed that the Iranians who reported synthesizing the chemical agent in 2016, reply that Novichok is colourless. The British, Americans, Czechs, and Koreans who have done the same laboratory work and who held stocks of the nerve agent before 2018, refuse to say what colour their Novichok is.
And yet, despite all the preliminary vetting by British intelligence agents, years of double-checking by government officials, and months of closed-door sessions and redactions ordered by Hughes, the truth has managed to slip out. A man named Josep Vivas, a Spaniard living in Barcelona, was the unintended, unguarded source.
His evidence appears in the record of the Hughes proceedings for November 28. [page 1]. Hughes doesn’t mention the name or the evidence in his report.
Left: the Iranian proof of Novichok manufacture in 2016 Researchgate.net. Right: this, the only comprehensive study of the Novichok case, revealed the clue of the colour of Novichok at publication of January 2025.
Vivas was a vice president of Puig, the company which manufactures and sells the bottled perfume branded Nina Ricci which in the British Novichok story has been turned into the Russian murder weapon.
“I am making this statement,” Vivas signed for the Hughes Inquiry on February 12, 2024, “in addition to a letter I provided on 27 July 2018. Prior to me writing and signing that letter, I was shown a number of images of a small perfume bottle branded ‘Nina Ricci Premier Jour Perfume’. The images I viewed were under police exhibit reference [redaction tagged VN551/10]. I was shown further images of a perfume box labelled as ‘Premier Jour Nina Ricci’. This was under police exhibit reference [redaction tagged VN521/3]. On Friday 2nd February 2024, I was again shown the images of [redaction tagged VN551/10] and [redaction tagged VN521/3] before signing this statement and I set out my observations on them below.”
The photographs of the poison bottle shown in public on November 28, 2024, were censored – a large black mark was pasted across the bottle contents. But British agents had shown Vivas the photographs just days after July 11, 2018, when the bottle was purportedly discovered at the Sturgess crime scene. Vivas was shown the photographs again more than five years later, before he testified before Hughes. He saw the bottle without the black mark.
The key observation he confirmed he had seen on both occasions was this: “The liquid inside the bottle. Premier Jour perfume is pale pink, and from the photos I observe that the liquid contained in the bottle is yellow.”
If the perfume is pink; if Novichok is colourless; and if the liquid in the murder weapon was yellow, then the liquid in the perfume bottle allegedly used by Sturgess cannot have been Novichok.
QED – Quod erat demonstrandum, as the ancient lawyers used to conclude their proofs.
The colour yellow was a British fabrication; the black mark was British camouflage. And yet the secret slipped out into the open by Hughes’s mistake. The bottle which Sturgess allegedly sprayed herself with did not contain Novichok.
Left, Josep Vivas; right, Charles Rowley.
The only witness to the existence of the perfume bottle before Sturgess allegedly used it was Charles Rowley, but Hughes ruled he was unable to give consistent and credible evidence and was excluded from public testimony and cross-examination.
“It is impossible,” Hughes reported, “to avoid the conclusion that by now Charlie Rowley was – no doubt with good intentions – simply creating false memories (confabulating) or reconstructing events, and was, moreover, astute to pick up hints from the interviewing officers which he may have misinterpreted as endorsing the theory that the discovery had been (a) in a bin near the charity shops and (b) during the week before Saturday 30 June 2018. Neither of those propositions was in any way supported by any independent evidence, save that such bins were often his targets… The same applies to a much later interview in February 2019, when Charlie Rowley said that he did not think that he had had the bottle for more than four days… Nothing is added by a valiant attempt by the police on 15 July 2019 to compose a witness statement of his recollections for the Inquest… Here, Charlie Rowley returned to the assertion that the bottle had been picked up in the street on his way to the pharmacy, either in Salisbury or Amesbury, whilst adding that he might have picked it up from the charity bins “the day before” (Friday 29 June 2018). It follows that I derive no assistance from Charlie Rowley’s understandably fallible memory on the subject of when and where he came into possession of the bottle. I do, however, find that it is more probable than not that he did find it somewhere, and that for this to happen it must have been left somewhere in a public or semi-public place by those who had used Novichok on Sunday 4 March 2018 on the front-door handle of Sergei Skripal’s house” [page 84].
“More probable than not that he did find it somewhere” is less probable than that Rowley did not find the perfume bottle anywhere; did not give it to Sturgess; did not know how it showed up in his kitchen days after the police searches of the house had uncovered drug paraphernalia and illegal drugs but not the bottle of the yellow liquid.
Hughes was right to find that Rowley was “creating false memories”. That’s because he could not remember what had been fabricated after he and Sturgess had been taken to hospital. Rowley could not remember what he hadn’t done. He couldn’t testify that he had found the perfume bottle because he hadn’t found it. Rowley’s memory failure — “no doubt with good intentions” in Hughes’s endorsement – was evidence there had been no perfume bottle in the house when Sturgess had the heart attack which killed her.
The toxicological evidence of Sturgess’s blood samples establishes that the combination of drugs in Sturgess’s bloodstream, including fentanyl and cocaine, was the probable cause of her death – Hughes ignores the evidence.
Source: U of Leicester, East Midlands Forensic Pathology Unit Post-Mortem Examination Report: Dawn Sturgess Full Report
In the evidence presented at the Hughes hearings, Guy Rutty testified as the pathologist engaged by the Home Office; he was appointed together with Dr Philip Lumb by the Wiltshire County coroner, David Ridley, to conduct the autopsy on Sturgess’s body and gather the post-mortem evidence. Note that from Rutty’s partially redacted documents, the location of the “designated mortuary” was kept secret. Evidence unreported by Hughes has ruled out the location as Salisbury hospital where Sturgess had died, or the local undertaker, Chris White Funeral Directors, which took the body from the mortuary the day before the funeral on July 30. The location, in fact, was DSTL Porton Down; its representatives were recorded as attending the autopsy.
The procedure started at 1320 on July 17 and continued until just after midnight. The date on the report is November 29, 2018. That means more than five months had elapsed between the post-mortem and the signing of Rutty’s report. The dates given for the consultations which Rutty records with others ran from mid-July to September 16. The date for the DSTL Porton Down report he attached to his own has been classified, but meetings and exchanges of notes between Rutty and Porton Down agents are dated by Rutty on July 26 and August 2. Hughes omits to investigate the reason for the delay until end-November for completing the report; Rutty doesn’t reveal it.
“A toxicology result,” according to Rutty’s report, was also entered which showed the presence of clopidogrel, rocuronium, atropine, cocaine and its metabolite, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, fentanyl, midazolam, ethyl sulphate, mirtazapine and its metabolite, zopiclone and its metabolite as well as nicotine and its metabolite. An EEG (a test to look at brain activity) was performed which showed very low amplitude with little, if any cerebral activity which was considered to represent diffuse cerebral dysfunction which could be due to severe hypoxic brain injury (brain injury due to a lack of oxygen).”
The text of Rutty’s report indicates that the toxicological evidence obtained from testing of Sturgess in hospital and by an associated laboratory failed to detect Novichok — page 23, lines 567-68. This means that the initial cause of death listed on the documents required for release of Sturgess’s body for cremation and burial did not mention Novichok. These documents – the coroner’s release, the funeral director’s cremation form – have all been kept secret.
The discovery of Novichok is reported in Rutty’s autopsy report to have occurred in November 2018 when “the second examination used an immunohistochemical approach” and “the third examination used a histochemical approach”. Follow what Rutty told Hughes in the hearing of November 5 here.
In his official reporting Rutty used circumlocutions to conclude he couldn’t tell what drugs may have been the cause of her death. The toxicology, he said, “identified a number of therapeutic and non-therapeutic drugs to be present. Although I have not been provided [sic] with the levels of the drugs identified, I am not aware [sic] that there is any indication [sic] to suggest that the deceased’s collapse was a direct [sic] result of the action of either a therapeutic or illicit drug.” – line 273. Sic marks Rutty’s evasions.
Source: U of Leicester, East Midlands Forensic Pathology Unit Post-Mortem Examination Report: Dawn Sturgess Summary Report
In the Anglo-American law and court practice for suspicious death cases, this is the point at which evidence is either inadmissible for the prosecution’s case or short of the required standard of beyond reasonable doubt for the judge and jury. Rutty also qualified his conclusion on the cause of Sturgess’s death by saying: “I am of the opinion that these observations, although reported organophosphate toxicity, are not necessarily specific in their own right to organophosphate toxicity.” This isn’t gobbledygook. It is Rutty’s qualification of what he was told by Porton Down and MOD to sign for cause of death. “Not necessarily specific” means no proof of Russian Novichok beyond reasonable doubt, nor even on the balance of probabilities.
In his testimony to Hughes, Rutty referred to what he had been told by Porton Down, claiming it was “independent”. Independent of Hughes’s proceeding, Porton Down was. Independent of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD), it was not. Whom did Rutty think he was fooling?
“I understand,” testified Rutty, “that there is independent [sic] laboratory evidence that the deceased was exposed to Novichok and that it is considered [sic] that this was through a dermal route. Thus, I am of the opinion that the clinical presentation in terms of the signs and symptoms, as well as the in-lift laboratory tests and the tests and reports received following the autopsy examination all support that Dawn Sturgess did not collapse or die from a natural medical event, an assault or the result of a therapeutic or illicit drug overdose but rather due to the complications resulting from a cardiac arrest caused by Novichok toxicity. Having been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok…appears from the information I have been provided [sic] to have occurred through a dermal exposure…”
Missing from this, the sole source of Hughes’s pathological evidence, is the original pathologist engaged by Coroner Ridley; that was Dr Philip Lumb. In July 2018 Rutty was accompanied by an academic colleague, also a Home Office-registered pathologist for suspicious death cases, Lumb. According to Rutty’s summary report, he “was instructed by HM Senior Coroner to be present throughout the autopsy examination and to provide a second independent report concerning the autopsy findings and death of Dawn Sturgess. I can confirm that Dr Lumb and I undertook the examination together, and that 1 have not had sight of his independent report” [page 8].
Lumb and his report have been excluded by Hughes, from the Inquiry investigations. Lumb’s “independent report”, along with what Rutty has identified as Lumb’s “autopsy contemporaneous notes” and emails the two of them have exchanged, have been kept secret. Since Lumb was not present in the second and third examinations conducted by Rutty in November, it is highly likely that he cannot have testified to Hughes that he detected any evidence of Novichok poisoning as a cause of Sturgess’s death. This is the reason Hughes excluded Lumb – without explanation.
Lumb, the independent medical expert who knows what killed Sturgess before Novichok was added to the death certificate by Rutty, refuses to answer press questions.
John Helmer is an Australian-born journalist and foreign correspondent based in Moscow, Russia since 1989. He has served as an adviser to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia, and has also worked as professor of political science, sociology, and journalism. Read other articles by John, or visit John's website. 
