Police officers urged paramedics and firefighters to treat the second novichok incident in 2018 as a drug overdose despite warnings from the ambulance and fire services that it had similarities to the first poisoning four months earlier in Salisbury, a public inquiry has heard.The fact the victim was known to the police as a junkie helped, no doubt.
The inquiry heard that Rowley had a number of convictions for possession of class A and class C drugs and, as a result, a Wiltshire police inspector concluded his symptoms were most likely drug-related – a judgment that led to Wiltshire police officers entering Rowley’s contaminated flat. The ambulance service spoke to an inspector with the Wiltshire police, O’Connor said. “Based on the intelligence, [he] formed the opinion that this incident was most likely owing to drugs,” O’Connor told the inquiry. “He noted the apparent nervousness of the other emergency services, but remained of the opinion that this was drug-related and was to be treated as such.”
Wiltshire police’s deputy chief constable, Paul Mills, told the inquiry: “The police officers were overly confident. I don’t believe it was wrong for them to have a hypothesis, based on the recent intelligence that they were aware of through the lens of the police service in Wiltshire, that this potentially could have been a drugs-related incident.”
No-one would. Even knowing the details of the other case, what's most likely, exotic Russian assassins targeting the local junkie, or overdose? Who wouldn't make the same calculation?
Nor was he the only one to screw up, although this mistake actually helped...
It was also revealed to the inquiry that Skripal’s life may have been saved because he was mistakenly given atropine, a drug used for organophosphate poisoning. Wayne Darch, the deputy director of operations at the South Western ambulance service NHS foundation trust, told the inquiry that paramedics at the scene had misdiagnosed Skripal and his daughter Yulia’s symptoms as an opiate overdose. O’Connor said: “Atropine was in fact administered to Sergei Skripal by one of the ambulance staff present by accident. He intended to give the administration of naloxone but picked up the wrong bottle and in fact gave him atropine. “We will hear from Mr Faulkner, the expert, that that would have clearly helped Mr Skripal and may have even saved his life.”
This must surely be the only time an error has had a good outcome in the history of the NHS.
