By Andrew O’Reilly, Fox News
A Russian colonel turned British double agent found poisoned on a UK park bench Sunday is likely the latest victim in a long line of Kremlin-ordered hits against spies and dissidents carried out with poison-tipped umbrellas, isotope-laced tea and bullets to the back of the head.
Sergei Skripal, a 66-year-old former Russian military intelligence officer, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia are both in critical condition at a nearby hospital, as British police work to determine what “unknown substance” poisoned the pair. Posion has been a frequent weapon of death used by Russian intelligence agents, stretching back some 40 years.
British police in hazmat suits have erected a tent over the bench where the two were found, and cordoned off a nearby Italian restaurant and pub as officers from numerous law enforcement agencies comb the area for evidence and review nearby surveillance cameras.
As they typically have in the past, the Russians are claiming they know nothing about what happened to Skripal and his daughter. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisted Moscow has no information about “this tragic situation,” and has offered to cooperate with the investigation.
But to many experts, the suspected poisoning bears all the classic signs of a Kremlin-backed hit.
“We have to have the caution that this could be just a particularly bad form of food poisoning,” Mark Galeotti, head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, told Fox News. “But this does certainly bear all the hallmarks of what the Russians call ‘wet work,’ or an assassination attempt.”
Russia’s shadowy spy agencies have over the decades found creative ways of offing their enemies, including the now-infamous 1978 poisoned-umbrella stabbing in London of dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov.
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